


These Kids, They're All Right

by Lywinis



Series: Lo(v)er - Carve it in the Bridge: A Reddie ficlet/one-shot listing [2]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Character Study, Eddie Kaspbrak Loves Richie Tozier, F/M, M/M, Richie Tozier Loves Eddie Kaspbrak, in this house we don't bury our gays, it is love Mike Hanlon hours 24-fucking-7 in this house as well, nor do we bury our Staniels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-07
Updated: 2020-03-26
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:27:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 29,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23055463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lywinis/pseuds/Lywinis
Summary: The Losers get to grow up. They get to move on.Single-focus character studies featuring each of the Big Seven.
Relationships: Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh, Bill Denbrough/Audra Phillips, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Patricia Blum Uris/Stanley Uris
Series: Lo(v)er - Carve it in the Bridge: A Reddie ficlet/one-shot listing [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1686373
Comments: 26
Kudos: 94





	1. Bill

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bearfeathers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bearfeathers/gifts), [birkin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/birkin/gifts).



> 
>       
>     
>     
>         _Hello, hello
>     Last time that I saw your face
>     Was recess in second grade
>     And it made me feel young
>     
>     ------
>     
>     Goodbye, goodbye
>     I said to my bestest buds
>     We said that we'd keep in touch
>     And we did our best
>     All my new friends
>     We smile at party time
>     But soon we forgot to smile
>     At anything else
>     
>     Won't you help me sober up?
>     Growing up, it made me numb
>     And I wanna feel something again
>     
>     -- AJR, "Sober Up" (feat. Rivers Cuomo)_
>       
>     
>     
>     

Bill Denbrough has never been able to find an ending. It’s become something of a running joke among his critics, that he can chill people to the bone, make them keep turning pages, only to fall flat at the very tail of the story thread he was chasing.

He can weave them together, push them into skeins of prose and description, but he can never find his finish, can never knot and seal the ends. It’s been that way since he was a teenager; it feels like it’s important.

He almost wishes he could remember.

It’s been decades since he thought of home, a nebulous grey area in his memory.

He can vaguely recall Georgie, as though from a long way away. The small child in the photos his mother can’t bear to look at, he looks like a stranger, someone Bill could have known. His pediatrician thinks the stutter remains because of the trauma of losing his little brother, but Bill would have told him that he can’t even remember that – but it never seemed to matter when he spoke up. Not that they would listen past the repetition of consonants that he couldn’t quite spit out, had to back track and chase because they weighed like stones on his tongue.

They tied him down, so he took to writing.

He’s good at it, he knows. Even if his workshops don’t produce better endings, the meat of the book is good. He’s just got to practice.

He grows, but not as much as he thought he would. He’s fairly average, fairly intelligent, fairly stable. Never completely, never fully. He learns to cope, to leverage it. His books take off, despite their flaws. People can see what he does, and he keeps writing.

Eventually, as he forgets, his stutter lessens. ( _He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts._ ) It means nothing now. It comes out, when he’s stressed, upset, spiraling over something. But now, he doesn’t remember why.

He writes. He writes and writes and stacks manuscript after manuscript, chasing something he can’t quite seem to catch.

Derry comes calling.

* * *

He remembers, now. The stench of this place, the sharp-sweet smell of something rotting, just out of sight. He remembers the Barrens, standing in the stream, soaking his shoes and his jeans, terror filling his belly like a steel weight. He remembers Georgie’s voice, floating through the drains. He remembers—

_He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts._

Derry has welcomed him home.

Bill finds a bike that rides like the devil Himself, finds his brother still speaking to him through the pipes. He finds his friends, the ones who mattered, who came back for him and with him, and who burrowed so deep into him that he can’t figure out why they forgot in the first place. They stand hand-in-hand-in-hand, their voices wavering with fear but they’re _there_ and it’s _real_ and they can do this. They can do this.

They tread through darkness, chasing lights.

He lays Georgie to rest, once and for all, the picture of a towheaded little boy in a yellow raincoat no longer blurred through guilt and tears. He’s crowded by Richie and Ben, Mike and Eddie, Bev and Stan. He breathes them in, feels them clutch him tighter, keep him planted to the good earth of the Barrens, baked in the sun of too many lost summers.

Bill knits them to himself, sews up the ragged edges of his life, brings them full circle into the light of day.

The scar fades.

The memories don’t.

He returns home to Audra, to his big study with the plate glass window where he can watch the dogs run in the backyard. It’s beautiful, but it’s not where he needs to be.

He gathers up his laptop, his pads of paper and his pens, and he retreats into the guest bedroom. He kisses his wife, tells her that there’s a story he needs to write, but that he will be there when it is done. There’s a card table, a chair, and most importantly, no window facing him. He faces the wall, turns himself inward, and turns himself on.

Bill remembers, and he knows now how it ends.

It is his best book yet.

It is not his last.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't mind me. Paying my taxes in Clown Town with the rest of us. Expect one for each of the Losers by the end, so seven chapters in total.


	2. Beverly

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She hates the word _pretty_. Even before she discovers feminism—and college and girls who kiss girls when they’re alone in their dorms—Beverly Marsh hates the word. It feels like a possessive hand on the back of her neck, leaving dirty-black thumbprints against the rounds of her spine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter: Referenced past abuse, nothing specific or graphic. May be triggering regardless of how vague it is. Feel free to skip if you like.

She hates the word _pretty_. Even before she discovers feminism—and college and girls who kiss girls when they’re alone in their dorms—Beverly Marsh hates the word. It feels like a possessive hand on the back of her neck, leaving dirty-black thumbprints against the rounds of her spine.

_You’re so pretty, why would you do that to your hair?_

As if it’s anyone else’s to do something with.

_What’s a pretty girl like you doing in a place like this?_

Words that follow her onto the train, off the bus, down streets as she picks up her pace.

_You’re pretty, just like your mother_.

Half-remembered, the words spoken soft, the consonants lost, slurred in a haze of beer and the smell of bacon grease. Floral perfume, the kind that makes her choke, makes her scrabble for the window as she inhales the smog of city air.

She tells them it’s allergies.

She still hates the word. She grows into a woman, knows how to drape it around herself like armor, hiding the soft, vulnerable parts deep in her chest. There’s a hole there that can’t quite close, not quite sealed, holding on to something she can’t remember and couldn’t articulate if she could.

She looks. She tries. It’s hidden behind a thought that’s half-formed, like a nascent star, gaseous and burning bright at the center of her.

_January embers._

She looks, seeks it out.

It makes it easy to hook a finger into her, to find her patterns and lean on them, mold her into something she’s not, force her into a box. Create a happy marriage, the front done up like limewashed brick while the back crumbles into black mold and rotted wood.

But pretty, on the outside.

She chokes on the word in her daily life, listens to it follow her around like a miasma, echoing in her ears even as she rises to the top, because that’s all her worth ever was to these people. They care that she’s pretty.

It wraps around her neck like collar, bound to whoever wields it.

She itches for a pair of scissors, the bounce of curls and the tangy blue-metallic wisp of cigarette smoke. Skinned knees, a rock in her fist as she makes something of herself. Really makes something of herself, instead of locking herself away like a porcelain doll. Blood instead of champagne, bruises instead of canapes.

The first time Tom connects, it’s jarring. It brings her full loop into herself, dizzy and breathless as her throat tightens. He’s snarling something, she can’t hear it over the rush of blood in her ears.

He tells her he’s sorry in the morning.

She believes him, but never quite in the same way.

The hole in her sternum gets bigger, craves more.

Derry comes calling.

* * *

She walks to the corner with nothing but the clothes on her back, her phone and her wallet. She takes steps for herself, brings herself back home. She frees herself, the pale skin of her ring finger shiny in the streetlights.

She feels like she can breathe again.

She finds them again, the boys from her childhood, grown into men. Soft voices until they’re not, but their shouting has never bothered her, made her flinch like others did. It was never directed at her, around her and about her and through her, but never at her, not like that. Rough and tumble, closing ranks around her though they know she can handle herself.

She is free here, or she can be. She remembers what it feels like.

Derry has welcomed her home.

She feels eyes on her now, but they feel familiar, like they did before. She knows this gaze. It’s not threatening, not like the others, the possessive hands and eyes and thoughts.

It doesn’t seal the hole in her chest, but it makes it tight. It feels like it could, if she could just figure it out.

She’s beaten and bruised and covered in what must be gallons of blood. She swims through it, the texture soupy, like she thought it must be when she was a child. Her head goes under. She can’t breathe, she can only hear the thunderous rush of a thousand thousand hearts, dead and dying and living, an endless cycle.

And then, she hears it.

The words written on the postcard, screamed out over the sounds of Its laughter, cutting bright-sharp through her fear and pressing against her chest, against the hole in her sternum, the last piece of the puzzle for what she was searching for, she finds it, she knows. She thinks she might have always known, at least in hindsight.

_My heart burns there, too._

His face, not Bill’s, when she wakes. Pulling her from the Deadlights, calling her back. Grounding her, centering her. The thought is euphoric, a rush like the inhale on a fresh cigarette, pulling air deep into her lungs. It doesn’t stop her from grabbing Ben’s hand, pulling him from choking dirt and collapsing timbers, their hands clutched fierce together with straining sinew.

The grip on her hand is not a leash. It is a lifeline.

They leave Derry together.

* * *

She arrives to the place she called home, where she melted into the corners and tried not to take up too much space. She finds it empty, and she packs her things and leaves. It is only when the police come knocking that she finds that Tom followed her to Derry.

She can’t say that she’s sorry. Beverly Marsh isn’t that woman anymore.

She provides the police with everything they require, and eventually the case is closed. There is no body, no trace, save for a vehicle abandoned at the Ironworks and a room that was never checked into. She gives them pound upon pound of evidence and Ben’s presence convinces them that Tom is no longer here and wouldn’t be welcome if he came knocking. They leave it cold, unsolved in an archive that gathers more dust than answers.

She knows they won’t believe her even if she tells them.

Instead, she wakes up one day, and then the next. She climbs the ladder one rung at a time. She sits down next to Ben, and tells him she had a wonderful dream.

Because she had.

Scars don’t all heal like the one she sliced into her palm, but Ben doesn’t seem to fit into the shape of the man she’d married. He fills out a wholly different outline, dark chocolate eyes tight at the corners as he listens to her talk. He tells her this isn’t something they can fix alone. It’s strange, to hear those words, but it shouldn’t, not from a man like Ben. She realizes that, and is surprised again.

Perhaps she shouldn’t be.

Ben doesn’t use the word _pretty_. He says how he feels in other ways, quieter ways. She has to center herself to listen for them, reorient so she can speak his language. A hand on the small of her back—not to force his bidding, but as though to reassure himself she’s there. Light and unobtrusive. Fingers linked, even if it’s just pinkies. His palm smoothing over one of her ankles as he reads with her legs in his lap, wholly focused on his task and yet not. Centered around her and through her.

He takes her hand over the center console as he drives her to her first appointment.

It is not a leash. It is a lifeline.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love Bev so goddamn much.


	3. Ben

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ben has always felt too big to be allowed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 
>       
>     
>     Feels like something's special but it never felt like love
>     Wonder what we could be living in another life
>     Catch us in the mirror and it looks a lot like love
>     Then you stop me talking as you kiss me from above
>     
>     -- Bastille, "Another Place"
>     
>     
>     

He knows he takes up too much space. Even when he loses the weight, sheds the pounds by running as fast and as far as he can—not just from the clown but from Derry itself, moving away after high school—he can still feel phantom brushes against mass that’s not there anymore, hunching in on himself as he passes by people in hallways. He can feel judging eyes on him as he goes for a morning and evening run.

School passes in a blur of books and studying, his head dropping to his desk as he falls asleep, cramming math and science and tensile strength equations into his head. He relearns how to draw, how to put what’s in his head on paper and to bring it to life under steady, careful hands. He builds models to scale, sweeping curves and lines that are more elegant in his head, but he’s getting there.

He grows tall, taller than he thought he would, and slowly, his presence draws stares because he commands it, not against his will. When his designs take off and he becomes respected for his creations, it is no longer him they’re staring at.

When he speaks, they listen. When he suggests, when he shows them a new way for things to be done, he can see their admiration, their wonder. He is himself, now, and he is brave. He is no longer the boy who was afraid to pull his sweatshirt off in the summer.

Now he’s a man who dreams of hair like pale flame and wonders who she is.

He lives alone. Not for want of company—there are plenty of women and men who would fall over themselves to put themselves on offer for him, but he just smiles and shakes his head. He’s not waiting—but he’s not _not_ waiting. He doesn’t know.

_He does know, because they see abdominals and a handsome face and would be disgusted if they knew. If they’d seen him before. They don’t see him. They never saw him. He remembers someone. **Someones.** They **saw** him. He can’t place their faces or their names or—_

It’s just…not right.

He doesn’t know why. He just knows that his empty home and empty bed are exactly as they need to be, as he likes them.

Derry comes calling.

* * *

At first, it’s strange, standing on the rain-slick pavement, walking up behind the cloud of pale red hair— _darker now, she hasn’t seen the sun,_ he thinks. It’s a shame, she was always resplendent in the summer, freckled and laughing. The sun turned her hair to braided copper, shining with a vibrancy that was the same as her personality.

She’s dithering, unsure and hunched into herself, as though she’s wondering if she should even be here.

“Is there a password, or something?”

She turns.

Derry has welcomed him home.

* * *

It’s strange, he thinks, sharing his private space with someone, even if that someone happens to be Beverly Marsh.

She floats through the hallways like an ethereal being sometimes. Her steps are light, as though she’s afraid of disturbing things, of leaving her mark. Remembering her own history, seeing the bruises that were slowly healing on livid flesh at Jade of the Orient, it makes him sick to think about.

The first night, he offers her a guest bedroom.

These things between them, they’re a lot. He knows. He knows and she knows and so he offers her the room across the hall from him, telling her that she’s welcome to anything here. His unspoken inclusion of himself skims under the surface of the conversation as he bids her goodnight.

She decides herself to climb into his bed with him. He’s laying there, head propped in his arms crossed behind them, thinking. Deep in his own head, where he lives most of the time. A rap on his doorjamb makes him start, and he looks over.

Bev, wearing a long shirt, her eyes wide and dark. He feels his mouth dry out but he sits up regardless, the sheets pooling around his waist. She’s pale as a ghost, uncertainty making her shrink in on herself.

“Hey,” he manages.

“Hey,” she says in return.

The silence is thick with expectation.

“Can’t sleep?”

“Not really. It’s been…”

“…yeah.”

He is thirteen going on forty and so is she—but he is no longer a coward and has nearly three decades to make up for; he’s braver now than he was. He knows better, now.

He pulls the blankets back, and she crawls in beside him. Something slots into place as she curls close, the softness of her hair tucked against his chin.

“Okay?” she asks.

He almost barks a startled laugh. She’s comforting him, after all these years. After everything she’s been through.

Here, he doesn’t take up space. Bev fits. She’s not pressed to the side or shunted away, he doesn’t float outside his own skin in a detached sort of way, not here. Not with her. He lets out a breath, lets the expectation drop from his shoulders like a stone.

The last, most important weight he had to shed.

“Never better, Bev,” he says.

And that’s truer than it’s ever been.

She drifts off in his arms, and he lies awake, listening to the soft snuffle of her breath against his neck.

He wonders how he got so lucky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a lot about Ben that punches me right in the chest, very personal things. I want to explore them later on.


	4. Mike

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One by one, he watches them leave.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 
>       _
>     
>      Oh I cant stop thinking about
>     All of these feelings and all of these routes 
>     I cant stop thinking about
>     All of these feelings oh I'm filled with doubts
>     
>     -- Wolf Colony, "Holy"
>     
>     
>       _
>     

One by one, he watches them leave.

Bev is the first, by necessity. She goes when fall coats Derry in oranges and reds, dead leaves that fall and don’t even have the decency to be crunchy, like they’ve already rotted soft when they hit the ground. Mike thinks that maybe they have.

The red is never so nearly vibrant as her hair, haloing her in technicolor, flashing as she disappears over the cliff and into the green-black of the quarry’s water. She has always been brave. It seems fitting that she is the first.

He knows then that he loves her; that swift, devastating love that strikes when you least expect it. Her hands, scarred from rocks hurled at Bowers and his gaggle of shitheads, squeeze his and she smiles, shyly. He knows that this is good for her, best for her. Out of her father’s sphere of influence, Bev can thrive, can do all the things that she wishes to do.

But he loves her, fiercely, desperately. He realizes that it’s not just her, as he turns and looks at the others, watching her climb into her aunt’s car. They all love her, it’s true; it’s hard not to fall a little bit in love with Beverly Marsh. But no, this feeling, the warmth that drips into his veins, he knows that this isn’t just her.

It’s them. The Losers. They’re his, and he’s theirs.

He’s bound himself to them as tightly as he can—his first friends, despite not being a Townie, being a homeschooled kid, bonded in blood and mutual hardship, terror and hope and love. He loves them. He wants the best for them, and he understands in a way he doesn’t think the others do – this is what’s best for Bev, right now.

It doesn’t mean it won’t hurt. But he can bear it. For them, he can.

Mike breathes both easier and harder when he watches the tail lights turn on the street out of town, toward the highway. His hand, with its newly healing scar, pounds with the pulse of his heart.

* * *

Bill is the next. He is accepted to College in Boston, and that means he must leave, must break the tether of Derry and pull himself into the light. It’s important, they know, the way he says the word, a proper noun and all the gravitas that implies.

It has been three years since Bev left, three years since they saw her. She promised she would write.

She doesn’t.

Their letters go unanswered, and eventually, they are returned to sender. There is a quiet sort of hurt that travels through the Losers, the first time. He can feel it loudest from Ben, the sad cast of his brown eyes, holding the stamped letter, unopened though it is stained with its travel.

Mike doesn’t understand, not yet. He thinks he might, but he doesn’t know for sure.

He holes himself up in the library up until the very last day doing research, on the day that Bill packs the old station wagon that his father held for him when he bought a new car. Big Bill has always been their brother, their big brother, their protector. Mike goes, though he doesn’t want to watch him leave.

Mike feels the press of keloid tissue against his palm and knows that he must see this through.

He hugs Bill last, and possibly hardest. He can’t tell, as they don’t look at each other when Bill starts the car. They pile in, knowing that Bill has to leave but they can’t just let him go; he’s promised them a lift to the picnic area, and so they cram themselves in the seats, Stan in the passenger seat, Ben and Mike and Richie and Eddie crammed in the back without seatbelts—and Eddie’s bitching about how unsafe it is, but there’s a half-hearted cast to it that shows he’s not trying as hard as he could.

Big Bill’s last ride out of Derry is a solemn affair, with not even Richie able to crack a joke.

The picnic area is bright with late summer sun, weeds flowering up into existence because no one stops here, it’s a place for local kids to get away from town and smoke stolen cigarettes and drink stolen beer, to steal time that’s theirs alone.

The Losers, while they are not exactly children, are not exactly adults, and they steal some time, too.

Mike can smell the sweet-sour rot of the long grass, wet from a thunderburst of rain that marked the morning and cleared off by nine. It’s familiar, permeates all of Derry, weighing in the air like a hand pressing against the lungs.

Bill stops the car and they pile out, a gaggle of gangly teens, men in the making, and Mike can almost see them, ( _five years, ten years, fifteen years,_ **_twenty-seven years_** _)_ down the line. Growing up, growing old, space dividing them, setting them in compartments of their own lives. No longer the Losers, just…people. The space for Bev is still there, still natural, a hole that they all feel.

She should be here.

They do not blame her for her absence.

Bill’s eyes are not on Derry any longer. His are on the horizon, south toward the highway that will take him out of here and to the end of his road. The wind picks up, and for a brief moment, Bill’s hair is blown back and Mike can smell something fresh, flowers and wooded pines. It fills his lungs with possibilities he’s never known – he could go, too. He could keep walking, keep pushing down the highway, hitch a ride as fast and as far as he could, pile into the car with Bill, even—

Mike exhales, and Bill gets into the car.

The engine is overloud in the quiet summer air, Bill’s radio crackling because it never could catch the single radio station in Derry out here. He rolls down the window, and they crowd around it.

Their goodbye lasts forever. It’s not long enough.

Stan and Eddie leave first, the smaller boy scrubbing a palm over his eyes as their shoulders bump. Ben starts the slow walk home when the silence bears down too hard. Cicadas sing in the tall grass, the sound swelling as the night begins to fall. Mike doesn’t realize that it’s as late as it is, as hard as he’s been watching the highway, even though Bill is long gone.

He turns, and all that he can see of Richie is the bright cherry coal of a cigarette, bobbing in the darkness.

“This sucks,” Richie says.

Mike can’t help but agree.

* * *

Stan leaves next. Mike helps him pack, taking down all the meticulously sorted bird books and stacking them in boxes, wrapping puzzles and knickknacks and kitsch. Each is a memory, not his own, but Stan’s, and he takes care to handle them with the respect they deserve.

Stan’s face is solemn, the dark circles under his eyes never leaving after the summer of 1989. Mike would ask if Stan has slept well since then, but he knows the answer. It’s not about sleeping. It’s about this place, the weight and measure of Derry holding you down, keeping you here, like a manacle you can’t see.

They are eighteen and Mike feels eighty, puttering around the room and moving boxes down to the truck. The walls being bare seems like a sacrilege, stripped of everything that makes this Stan’s space and his home and his life.

Mike and Stan don’t talk, but they don’t have to. Mike understands the pull of leaving. He knows, has known since Bill left for college six months ago, since the letters stopped coming five months ago.

The Losers pull in as they’re getting the last of the boxes into the truck, and they pile in to help. It’s a quiet affair, much like Bill’s escape. Less like moving and more like a wake for someone who’s still living. Richie’s good humor falls flat, so he just stops talking, shunting boxes into the truck with Ben’s help.

This is something that feels like the weight of Destiny, that bitch, and his scar tingles when he shakes Stan’s hand.

Stan pulls him in for a hug instead, and Mike hopes, wildly, that he never lets go.

Stan hugs them all, and Mike tries to memorize the feel of his chest bumping with the other’s, the feel of sandy curls against his cheek. There’s a hitch in his breath but he doesn’t think Stan notices, hopes he doesn’t, because getting out has always been their end-game.

They all just thought it would be together.

Mike watches them go, Stan and his mother following behind Stan’s father in the U-haul, tail-lights disappearing. It’s how he marks the time, the passage of it that feels sluggish, yet inexorable in this place.

Richie nudges his shoulder.

They go and get pizza.

Life goes on.

* * *

Bill leaving sets off a chain reaction. Stan is next, then Ben, called away to a design school somewhere in Savannah. Mike doesn’t get a chance to help him pack or see him off; his grandfather demands his time at the farm, to help with the lambing.

There is no time for goodbyes in the spring, no time in the summer. Fall is best, but Derry is at its weakest in the solstice, a break in the miasma that some of the younger residents seem to sense, lifting their heads to the wind as though scenting freedom.

He sneaks away anyway, manages to get to the edge of town on his bike as Ben rounds the corner and waves until he can’t see him anymore.

He doesn’t think Ben looks back.

Mike doesn’t blame him.

* * *

Richie is next to last. Mike thinks Richie hopes to portray the idea that he’s been the eternal slacker for the entire time that Mike has known him, but he put in his applications finally, _finally_ , and finds out he’s been accepted to Berkeley, out in California. He tells them over pizza, as spring turns into summer.

Mike is happy for him, but feels that pull in his chest regardless.

He’s not stupid; he knows why Richie stays. The reason is currently wedged between them on the bench—Eddie sits there, straw wrapper twisted between his fingers as he details exactly why moving to California is so dangerous. How driving for so long will get him a cramp that will turn into a blood clot that turns into—

Richie listens, in the way that he always listens, and then dismisses everything with a joke that drives Eddie fucking bonkers because it’s mathematically and emotionally calculated to get a rise out of the kid.

It’s a precision strike, because he and Eddie are off to the races, and Mike thinks—even as he laughs along—that Richie might stay in Derry forever if Eddie would have him.

He doesn’t know for certain, but he knows in the way that he knows that Ben carries an eternal torch for Bev, even when she stopped writing. He knows in the way that he knows that Stan will make a great teacher like he always talked about. He knows like he knows Bill will make it big, he read the unfinished manuscript—it was good, better than anything he’s read in a long time.

It’s not his place to guess, but he figures that Richie will tell Mike when he’s ready. If he ever is.

These are just truths about his friends. He keeps them, because that is his job now. To remember.

He can’t explain it, even if he tried, but he knows that there’s something about Derry. Something that keeps you here. When you escape, you forget why you left, and you never return.

Mike almost pulls Richie aside, tells him to tell Eddie the whole messy, complicated truth. To take his hand and run, run as far and as fast as those newly long legs will take him.

He doesn’t.

Instead, he hugs Richie hard, holds him to him, one last time. He knows. He _knows_.

It’s not Richie’s burden to bear. He steps back, lets Richie say goodbye in his own way, one big hand on Eddie’s shoulder as he bends his head to say something, only for Eddie to jab him, sharply in the ribs with one of his elbows. Richie laughs and folds himself down into the car, stubbing out his cigarette on the concrete.

They watch his taillights disappear in the evening air. Eddie rubs at his eyes, as though tired.

“Fuck him,” he says, to no one in particular.

“He’ll be all right,” Mike says.

Eddie snorts. “He’s gonna get robbed at the first gas station he stops at.”

Mike smiles, but doesn’t disagree.

“I told him to call when he gets there.”

They turn back to the direction of town, heading for the lights of Main Street. Mike slings an arm around Eddie’s shoulder, and he knows he’s not Richie, could never be the Trashmouth king, but Eddie leans into him, gratefully.

“He will, Eddie.”

But Richie doesn’t.

* * *

Eddie doesn’t leave Derry until right before he turns twenty. He is the last, and perhaps that is why he lingers longest.

Mike might feel a bit selfish, hoping to keep at least one of them close until the very end, but it’s not through Eddie’s choice. Mike knows this and that’s where his guilt gnaws at the base of Mike’s spine, prodding him with dirty fingers.

Sonia Kaspbrak has never looked kindly on any of Eddie’s friends. Mike himself has always been the subject of suspicious stares, curtains twitching aside as he waits, politely, on the porch. Still, he waits, because she is not who he has come to see. No, it’s Eddie, frail but full of fight, ready to brawl at the drop of a hat.

The times have changed them, he thinks, sitting with Eddie at the diner. He has a cup of coffee, Eddie has declined all but water, which he then fiddles with but doesn’t drink. Mike thinks he just wanted something to do with his hands.

“The doctors are saying it’s…cancer.” Eddie doesn’t look at him, his soft brown eyes flickering toward the plate-glass window. “This isn’t her…being _her_. Like, they’re sure.”

“Jesus, Eddie,” Mike says, solemn.

“Yeah,” Eddie says, clearing his throat. “…yeah.”

What follows is a grueling year and a half, full of doctor’s visits, hospice care, preparations. Mike tries to be there through it all, but it’s hard when Sonia hates the sight of him, her face thin and drawn as her body eats itself alive, the cancer jumping from her ovaries to her liver in a process that Eddie says is _metastasis_ without inflection, without emotion at all. He memorized it off her charts and burned it into his brain as something else to be afraid of, as if there wasn’t enough of that fucking shit in this town.

 _Beep-beep_ , _Trashmouth_ , Mike thinks, as he realizes the irony of the cancer starting in her fucking ovaries. Because of course he would. He can hear the joke start in Richie’s voice, but it fades, because it’s been two years and Richie is _gone_.

Now there are two.

She shrinks, finally, losing weight over eight months that leaves her sallow and bony where once she was plump and sick in other ways. She can barely walk, bedridden while Eddie shuttles her back and forth to appointments, arranges a nurse that quits within the first week because Sonia Kaspbrak is insufferable at best and a harridan at worst, which leaves Eddie to sort through everything, both financially and physically, alone.

His father’s life insurance has been whittled away to the bone, the last bits going to treatment but the doctors finally give up the fight. There is nothing more they can do, they tell Eddie. The cancer is too aggressive and they caught it far too late to do much. All that’s left is to make her comfortable. Eddie sells the car to pay for it, makes a dent in his mom’s debt that’s swallowed up, like rain hitting the water of the ocean.

The words _palliative care_ leave Mike feeling cold as he watches Eddie say them. Eddie’s relationship with Sonia has always been complicated, love-hate that’s hate on the best of days, but there’s something about learning to mourn a mother who is still alive, mourn a mother you never had.

And maybe she tried to do her best, but Mike is on the outside looking in and all he can see is rage and anger and pain. Eddie is so tired, dark circles pushing into bruises around his eyes, shoulders bowed with a weight that he can’t unshoulder, not even for a little while.

Mike brings him meals, cooks them himself. He wonders if Eddie eats them, but he gets his plates and tins back, washed and sparkling clean.

As time goes by, he sees less of Eddie. He makes sure to get up to town to check on him, but sometimes his knocks go unanswered now. He considers using the key Eddie gave him, but doesn’t know if he should.

The curtains don’t twitch anymore when he comes by.

A month goes by, and word gets around. Sonia Kaspbrak finally died. She passed away in her sleep, and Eddie found her in the morning. Mike hops in his truck and is gone before lunch the next morning, pounding on Eddie’s door.

When he answers, Eddie looks like a ghost. He is pale and drawn and so fucking thin. Mike folds him in his arms and Eddie goes, like he’s made of paper. He’s worn through like a note folded and unfolded too many times, as though he’ll fall apart, shredding at the seams with one more go.

He doesn’t know how long they stand there in Eddie’s front hall, but when Eddie presses on his chest, Mike lets him go. Eddie’s eyes are dry, but red-rimmed.

“I’m gonna have to sell the house,” he says. His voice is hoarse. “To pay for the funeral and the bills.”

“I’ll help with whatever I can, man.”

And he does.

Eddie Kaspbrak, the Loser described as the smallest, as the weakest, by people on the outside—he makes it to age twenty before he chooses to leave. And it _is_ his choice, this time. No one else’s.

Strangely, like everything else in Derry, empty houses don’t stay empty for long. It’s snapped up and Eddie is paid out quietly. He has enough to go, to get out and be free. Mike helps him pack up and sell the house, sell and donate the furniture. He crashes on Mike’s bedroom floor for a night or two while he waits for the sale to finalize. The beater he buys will get him where he’s going, and the money he’s got saved will get him through school, with a job on the side.

Mike is proud of him. He doesn’t know how to say it in a way that won’t prickle Eddie’s testy nature, but he says it when he and Eddie stop at the picnic area just outside of town. He gets out of the car that Eddie has gone over with a fine-toothed comb, fixing and prodding before he left.

His shoes crunch on the gravel, and so do Eddie’s. He turns, finding Eddie watching him.

“So,” Eddie says, clearing his throat. “When are you getting out of this shithole?”

“I don’t know,” Mike says. He knows, but knowing is for him and not them, to keep them safe. It is his way of thanking them.

“You could come with me,” Eddie starts, but Mike is already shaking his head. They’ve had this conversation multiple times over the course of the last week. Sober, drunk, somewhere in between, it doesn’t matter.

“Not…not yet, Eddie,” he says. He’s surprised—but he shouldn’t be, in hindsight, he thinks—when Eddie throws himself forward into Mike’s arms.

“I’m gonna write,” he hears, muffled against his shoulder.

“I’ll write back,” Mike promises. He always does.

“I mean it,” Eddie says. He grabs the edges of Mike’s coat, shaking him. “I’m not gonna stop writing. I’ll keep in touch.”

“I believe you, Eddie.” Mike covers Eddie’s hands with his. “You gotta do this. I know that sticking around here is the last thing you wanna do.”

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles.

“Eddie, man, don’t be.” Mike grins at him. “I’m good. _We’re_ good. Make sure you stay safe.”

“Of course. It’s not _Richie_ you’re—you’re talking to.” Eddie’s face does this painful little twist, but he shakes his head. “I’ll call you when I get there.”

“Okay.” Mike says it with an air of finality, clapping Eddie’s shoulder and squeezing him tight. “You’ve gotta beat the dinner rush, man. Start making time.”

“Yeah,” Eddie says, scrubbing at his eyes with his shirtsleeve. It’s too big on him, one of Mike’s because Eddie’s always cold and someone’s gotta look out for him. Richie would kill him if he didn’t.

The last to leave.

The tail lights of Eddie’s beater disappear into the dusk, and it’s not long before the moon rises, full and fat and the color of bone. Mike uses it to light his way home.

Now, his vigil begins.

* * *

Eddie lasts longer than the others. His letters die to a trickle eight months in, talking about a woman named Myra.

* * *

Despite being home schooled, Mike Hanlon is not stupid as the town assessed. He finds things that he likes to study and he digs into them, cuts into the meat of them until he hits bone. He used to shy away from the analogy, but after the summer of ’89, he begins to see the reasoning behind embracing it.

He turns that laser focus on the evil sleeping below the town.

Mike is a good researcher. He pores through books and microfiche in the library, searches the internet. The problem is with the town. Perhaps it is because Pennywise is sleeping, returning to Its slumber and sinking deep into whatever passed for unconsciousness, but the town itself protects the thing in the sewer.

Mike is reasonably confident that if they’d killed It, the town itself would go, too. Ben might have called it a recursive system, if he’d been here. Mike can hear him talking about the incidents even now, each spaced too conveniently apart to be anything but a pattern. Derry has been here a long time, but that thing has been here longer. It’s built this town on the blood and brains and bone of people who died to feed the hunger sleeping below the system. There’s too much crap, too much slush built up in and around this town for it to not fold in on itself like a house of cards if Pennywise was truly dead.

They managed to hurt It, but they didn’t finish the job.

He doesn’t blame the Losers; being thirteen really puts a fucking damper on your ability to murder an eldritch abomination. The first thought he has is descending again, going in and finishing off the job. If he can do it alone, he might not need to bring them back into this terror. As he pulls maps of the sewer system, he realizes that this might not be as easy as he thought.

The tunnels beneath Derry are a warren.

He closes his eyes, opens them again. The picture is fuzzy, but he can feel the tickle at the back of his brain. He knows this isn’t right. He knows it’s not. They went in, came back out, they had a path.

He tries to retrace their path, following their steps below Neibolt.

They don’t exist on the map.

It’s not right. It’s not. He’s standing on streets he’s known since he was very small, still unsure as to which road leads down deep into the heart of Derry’s greywater system. A warren he’d navigated less than a decade prior, in the dark, screaming his fucking head off. Being chased by a clown.

Frustrated, he sweeps the maps off his library table like an irritated cat. The librarian gives him a look, and chastened, he bends to retrieve them.

The second thought he has is that perhaps a recursive system is more right than he knows. The clown doesn’t need to hunt, because It’s built a fucking preserve of its favorite treats right above its sleeping place.

He backtracks. Knowing what he knows now, he keeps meticulous notes, starts connecting the dots. He keeps a log of everything, even though he knows his writing could change, form other words. It’s the practice that’s calming, keeps him centered.

The librarian sees more of him than he knows she’s comfortable with, but it’s 1998, she can suck a fucking lemon if she wants, he’s in a public place. Others shy away from him, especially when he starts trying to ask questions. They must think he’s gone completely off his rocker, but he has a hunch that it’s something in the air, in the water, in this _place_.

With Pennywise being a shapeshifter, it’s likely that It even uses some form of low-level telepathy. Sussing out deep fears is exhausting if you’re stalking something, especially a human. He can’t be sure of anything. It drives him to the brink of madness.

Mike squats in the sheep pens, covered in blood as he mouths theories to himself while he works.

Perhaps he’s gone feral, he thinks sometimes, looking at himself in his bathroom mirror, but it happened. He still has nightmares about Henry _fucking_ Bowers and throwing him into the well at Neibolt. How he appeared at his house hours later and was taken to Juniper Hill.

He knows what happened; it _happened_.

He holds onto his memories of the Losers, holds them close. They are real, and solid, and alive. They are out there. They are out there, he can feel them, tethered to him in hope and fear and worst-best-most terrible of all, love. Bill and Stan and Eddie and Ben and Bev and Richie. He remembers them. He remembers summer days and fond insults and wrestling matches and comic books. Arguments that aren’t, laughter and jokes and _beep-beep_ , _Richie_.

They have forgotten, but he remembers, and he loves them still.

Mike Hanlon remains behind, protecting the people he loves with all his heart. The scar on his hand has not changed. He keeps his promises.

* * *

His grandfather passes when he is twenty-eight. There is no one left to run the farm but him, and so he sells the livestock and the farmhouse, moving into town and picking up odd jobs. When he is twenty-nine, the librarian has a stroke. There is no one but him to run the library, and so he takes on the duty of guarding the ever-shifting knowledge in Derry.

Sometimes it feels like he is a chess piece being slid into place by an unseen hand, but whatever it is, it has not revealed itself to him.

He is thirty-two when he discovers the Ritual. It lights a sort of hope in his chest, in a beacon that burns alongside the coal that the Losers left with him. He knows that he can finish this, given enough time and their support.

He has to be patient. Follow the pattern, look for the signs.

People cross the street to avoid him. He hears the rumors, knows they don’t like the questions he asks. He brings them out of their stupor, they hate it, and it never lasts long, leaving them with unexplainable feeling that he’s violated their privacy.

He climbs to his bedroom above the library alone.

Each year, as his birthday passes, there is a sense of expectation that falls over him. He holds his breath, looks for signs. They never come. He reminds himself of the pattern, every year.

He marks the year, regardless.

The years turn. He waits.

He turns forty.

* * *

September burns unusually hot. It feels like July again, the heatwave melting everyone who was ready to break out their sweaters and coats. He feels something heavy in the air, a thickness that isn’t normal. The fair is this month, and he’s been antsy about it this entire time.

There’s always been something about big groups of people that seem to attract weirdness in Derry.

Mike wanders the town, watching people put up flyers and set up booths, the canal rushing by mere feet away. It makes him uneasy, makes his skin itch, and he realizes it’s because the town smells like it did in 1989. Hot and wet and sour-sweet, like sewage was backing up in the drains.

Like rotting meat.

Mike feels terror drip down his back and into his guts, freezing him in place when Don Hagarty pushes past him, screaming for help. He can’t help the young man. There’s no help to be had.

Instead, his eyes lock on the underpass of the bridge that crosses the canal.

**_COME HOME._ **

**_COME HOME._ **

**_COME HOME._ **

**_COME HOME._ **

His duty, his vigil, has ended. The time is now.

He makes his way to the library, grabs his phone and looks down the contact list. It has been…so long since he’s seen these people. His friends. His loved ones. He has had to do borderline illegal things to get their numbers and keep them current. But he has them.

He holds that power in his hands.

One by one, he calls the Losers home, to Derry.

To him.

* * *

It’s over, and his chest feels tight.

He looks around at his circle of friends and feels it overwhelm him. They came back to help, they returned, they did what he asked because he needed them.

He hates that he doubted them, but it was only natural. The hole that Stan leaves is noticeable, but they don’t mention it.

He should be here.

They do not blame him for his absence.

Richie is inconsolable, for a time, which is understandable. They have to work backward out of the caves under Neibolt, carrying Eddie carefully, staunching the wound with Richie’s jacket and Bill’s shirt. They get him free, push away from the warrens of the sewers, Pennywise’s last line of defense.

They break the surface, they come into the light of dawn with Eddie unconscious over Richie’s shoulder and all of them screaming.

They can’t leave Eddie down there, in the cold and the dark. They **_won’t_**.

Losers never give up on each other.

The ambulance comes, the wail of the siren sounding thin and high with the rising of the sun.

* * *

The second time, he is there to see them off once more.

They linger, as though ashamed of forgetting. Mike smiles. There is nothing to forgive. It was necessary. If they carried the trauma with them the entire time, they might never come back. He accepted it back when he was thirteen and saw what the future held for him, and now?

Well, now, he has them back.

Dinner that night is at a hotel outside Derry, all of them piled on the beds and propped up, Eddie wincing every time Richie jostles the bed, but seeming happy to have him close, all the same. His shoulder is healing. It wasn’t as horrific as initially thought, a graze to the shoulder and through the meat of it.

The dark, the terror of the night and the sewers had twisted it, like they do to everything.

Mike has to agree with the assessment that Pennywise was sloppy. It was, the creature arrogant and prideful, dying to a sextant of terrified adults. They hadn’t managed to kill It the first time, but It hadn’t managed to kill them, either. Eddie would survive. He’d bear the scars the rest of his life, but he’s breathing.

It’s a loud affair, the Losers finally closing a chapter on their lives and sealing it shut beneath the sewers. There’s alcohol, but they’re not really drinking so much as savoring, Eddie cutting himself off after a beer because it makes him loopy.

Mike is just sitting, listening to all of them talk, making plans and laughing.

He doesn’t even realize he’s smiling while he watches all of them until Bill claps a hand on his shoulder.

“You look a million miles away,” he says.

“Just…thinking.” Mike clears his throat. “I should have been honest with you all.”

“Mikey,” Richie says, interrupting with his mouth full of burger. (They’d agreed to avoid Chinese food for a while. No more fucking fortune cookies.) “Man, it’s over. Shut the fuck up. We merc-ed that fucking clown and we’re big damn heroes.”

“Rich,” Eddie says. The other man’s head turns on a swivel, magnetically drawn to Eddie, and Mike wonders if now is the time. “Beep-beep.”

Not yet, apparently.

“Oh, fuck you too, man.” Richie’s laughing, and talk devolves back to the future.

Bill sits next to him on the floor, their shoulders bumping. “I understand why you did, Mike. You were scared. We all were.”

“We’re good?”

“We were never bad, Mikey,” Bill says. “You brought us b-b-back. You d-d-did what you had to.”

Mike slings his arm around Bill, and feels the other relax beside him.

“What are you gonna do now?” Bill asks, once they get done with the French fries in front of them.

“I don’t know,” Mike answers. It’s honest, and surprises him. “Travel, maybe. See all the places I could only read about.”

“Visit us?” Bill asks. “I talked with Audra. She wants to meet everyone. You t-t-too.”

Like the fear, Bill’s stutter is fading. Mike feels the knowledge wash over him and warm him. He tucks Bill closer to his side and sighs out, content.

“Of course,” Mike says. “Can’t let you forget me again.”

* * *

Florida is nice this time of year. While Maine is being blasted with snow, Miami is a balmy seventy-three degrees. Mike leans back in the seat of his car, the windows rolled down to enjoy the weather.

His phone rings. He thumbs the hands-free answer.

“Richie,” he says.

“Mikey!” Richie calls. “How’s Florida?”

“It’s good,” he says. He means it.

“You find a rich heiress in a nursing home down there, don’t waste your opportunity,” Richie says. Mike laughs, swiping a hand down his face.

“I’ll pass her your number,” he promises. “I’m meeting Bill and Audra down here.”

“Oh yeah?” Richie asks. “I forgot they were shooting for Bill’s new movie down there.”

“Yeah,” Mike replies.

“Where to after that, Cap’n?” Richie asks. His voice slides into a decent impression of Captain Barbossa from the Pirates films. Mike cracks up, and they devolve into giggles for a second.

“Probably drive to LA. See the sights while I’m out. The world’s my oyster.”

“Hell yeah,” Richie says. “Give me a call when you get here, you can crash with me.”

“Won’t that be cramping your style?” Mike asks, eyebrows lifted. “I thought you and—”

“No,” Richie says quickly. Too quickly. Mike’s smile grows, because he can see the blush from Miami. “He’s in New York.”

“Still?” Mike asks.

“Yeah, he has some loose ends to tie up,” Richie says. Mike can hear the wistfulness in his voice, but it’s a good kind. The kind that comes with airport reunions and long overnight calls. “But that just means we can put you up in Casa Tozier for a while. You’re always welcome.”

“Yeah,” Mike says. He knows. The thought makes him feel warm. “Call you later?”

“Sure thing, Magic Mike,” Richie says. “Tell Bill I said he sucks.”

The last word is a sing-song.

“I’ll tell him to call you,” Mike laughs. “We still on for Christmas?”

“Damn right,” Richie says.

“Good.” Mike disconnects and lets the roads take him to where he needs to be.

He steps out of the car, hugs Bill and Audra hard, and let them sweep him into their rental house. He is forty, he is free. His life has begun. Tomorrow, he gets to see a movie set.

Mike Hanlon has _so much_ to see and do.

He can’t wait.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this house it is loving Mike Hanlon hours 24-fucking-7. I sat down and had feelings.


	5. Stan

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All puzzles have a solution. Stan just has to think about them long enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 
>       _
>     
>      I did my best, it wasn't much
>     I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
>     I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you
>     And even though it all went wrong
>     I'll stand before the Lord of Song
>     With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah
>     
>     ― Leonard Cohen, "Hallelujah"
>     
>     
>       _
>     
> 
> Trigger warnings: Vague mentions of Stan's suicide attempt. Nothing graphic.

Stanley likes puzzles. Puzzles are complex, requiring him to sit in contemplation, to think about them. To manipulate them, push and pull, change his thought process and apply logic to them. They’re relaxing in a way that real life is not.

All puzzles have a solution. He just has to think about them long enough.

Some things in Derry, you can’t apply logic to them, because logic _doesn’t_ apply to them. He’s seen things growing up that he can’t rightly explain. Stepping back into cold logic doesn’t apply because it’s never applied in Derry.

Something lives beneath the sewers.

He knows this, has seen It, and he tries very hard to put it from his mind. He doesn’t talk about Neibolt, even though he knows the others want to, very much, discuss what they went through. Stanley Uris does not want to talk about Neibolt or what he saw down below. He doesn’t want to talk about the tiny, nearly invisible scars around his face, left by lamprey teeth but are enough to impede his beard’s growth before he shaves.

He steals the painting from his father’s wall, sets it alight alone in the Barrens late at night that summer. His father doesn’t know it’s him, never asks him, and the painting remains a sun-bleached spot on the wall in his father’s office until the day they move from Derry.

It’s like his father forgets about it when it’s gone.

He doesn’t talk about it.

He focuses on things he can see and touch and solve.

He focuses on Bill and Beverly and Ben and Richie and Mike and Eddie. He loves them, he does. He is not the outsider looking in, he is in there, laughing and teasing and loving with the rest of them, but he feels a door closing when Neibolt happens, separating him from them. It’s slow, watching it swing closed of its own accord, the hinges silent and oiled and insidious.

His father tells him that the feeling is natural; he’s becoming a man—he’s leaving his childhood behind.

Stanley doesn’t think that the feeling is quite the same. It’s hardly a crisis of faith; that’s never been his problem. Perhaps it’s just him, he doesn’t know.

He doesn’t talk about it.

Instead, he tries to enjoy what little he has left. He focuses on his puzzles and birdwatching and preparing for his future, bullying Richie and Bill into putting in their applications for college. Bev left when they were thirteen, and he feels the sting of her passing—they all do, boys roaming the world without their seventh, no longer lucky.

He finds himself wondering how she’s doing.

Eddie isn’t ready to start sneaking out applications yet. Stan understands that; Sonia Kaspbrak is suffocating in the way that the sewers could never be. Ben is applying on his own, he has good prospects for design schools. Mike doesn’t much talk about what he’s going to do after the summer, but Stanley can see the way his body shifts, tilts back toward the farm like he’s bound there with a bungee cord.

Stan thinks he might understand Mike better than he thinks.

Bill leaves for college the summer that they graduate.

Stan is proud of him; he can’t be otherwise. Big Bill Denbrough has a novel half-written, and it’s the scariest thing Stanley himself has ever laid eyes on. He’s going to college and he’s gonna finish it and Stanley can tell the world that it is written by his very best friend in the world.

Bill stops returning calls and writing a month in.

That, Stan can’t figure out. They’d had it happen with Bev, but Stan had chalked it up to her father and…all that.

He scrubs his hands over his eyes when he thinks about it, like there’s something missing. He’s dropped a piece beneath the table without realizing it, and now he’s groping blindly in the dark.

Before he can work it out, his own time to leave comes. His father is accepting a position working in a _yeshiva_ in Georgia. It’s a good opportunity, and it gets Stan the hell out of here. He’s glad for it.

It doesn’t mean that he won’t miss his friends.

It just means that he is free of Derry and the terror that consumes him.

Maybe he is growing up, he thinks.

* * *

Derry is a memory that has faded to background static when Stanley Uris meets Patricia Blum. He’s a teacher at a private school in Atlanta, she’s part of the local mixer that his coworkers have dragged him to, and he’s sitting in the corner, playing with his phone when she sits down next to him.

They make small talk; he thinks nothing of it. She’s pretty, engaging in a way he’s never quite encountered. She picks apart his logic with ease, poking it like a needle into a balloon, and he thinks then that he’s in love.

They’re not arguing, they’re debating, and there’s never the knife edge threat of bad feelings. She’s not dissecting him, she’s launching her own logical counterattacks.

She’s studying to be an astrophysicist. He can see why.

He knows he’s in love when they’re still debating six months later, his logic being prodded and poked and questioned in ways he hadn’t considered. Over Chinese food, over movies, during pillow talk. She’s smart, smarter than anyone he’s ever known and he’s besotted. He calls her ‘babylove’ for the first time and watches her expression instantly melt into adoration.

He starts saving more.

In a year, they are married, and Stanley finds that happiness is something that sits well on his shoulders. His nightmares, the barely remembered terrors of something that happened in childhood, going grey at the edges of his vision when he tries to think about it, it disappears from his mind’s eye when he has the brightness of Patricia Blum Uris beside him. It fades in comparison to the life he’s building.

He has grown up. He doesn’t mind it as much as he did when he was a kid. He thinks that it might be because the time passing has changed him, chipping off rough edges and smoothing them down.

They hike and bird watch and buy a house with a big back yard. He builds bird feeders and they plant flowers, slinging dirt at each other and laughing like children. He cooks, she does the dishes, he dries. She holds his face in her palms and he can feel the press of her wedding band, chill against the tiny scars around his jaw and he loves her, _he loves her_.

He gets fifteen years of bliss with Patricia Blum Uris and he will get another forty if he can make a deal with a higher power. Sixty if he really wants to push his luck.

His phone rings. His caller ID tells him it’s from Maine.

“Stanley Uris speaking,” he says. He can feel the chill crawl down his back.

“Stan. Stan the man. It’s Mike. You know, from Derry.”

Derry comes calling.

* * *

He wakes in darkness. He shouldn’t be surprised, he thinks. That was where It waits.

* * *

He knew it was too good to be true. It had been too easy. It was the simple neatness of the solution that had appealed to him when he’d begun, now it was caked in fear and mired in regret. It is dark, behind his eyelids, but he’s breathing.

How odd.

Did It get him regardless? Did Its reach go all the way to Atlanta?

It was a facet he hadn’t considered, something he might have run past Patty with the enormity of it, the lack of time—he didn’t have a chance, didn’t know _how_.

It is not silent here, like he thought it would be. There is the movement of air, the rustle of sheets and linens. He’s lying down, but he realizes he’s lying in a bed. It’s not uncomfortable, not really.

Is this…?

When he was a kid, he was inundated with Christian themes and ideology, as though he might convert by osmosis. It was not just Derry, it continued on through his adulthood, but he remembers it most viciously in Derry, remembers the whispers and the tolling of the church bells as he walked past. It’s a magnifying glass on his childhood, using the sun to burn a hole where he focuses the light.

There’s a part of him that is still twelve and in the sewers and screaming that thinks that this might be Hell but the rational part of him, the part that gripped his bird book and spat _Setophaga dominica_ like it was the worst sort of curse at the Thing in the Standpipe draws him up short, forces him to look at this objectively.

He cracks his eyes open. The light is dim, but not unbearable. It is cool, and there is the movement of air.

He makes a sound, he thinks, a noise in the back of his throat.

Someone shifts beside him.

“Stan…?”

Patty.

Stan feels the weight of everything crash down on him, and he makes a louder, broken noise. She’s beside him, her hands cool on his, fingertips icy as she grabs one of his hands in both of hers, presses his palm to her cheek. He can feel hot tears sliding down his fingers, between his knuckles, and his heart aches for her.

He’s done this.

“Oh, _Stan_.”

He realizes he is not in hell. He is in _Gehinnom_. This is infinitely worse.

* * *

They bind his arms, for the first few days. Just to make sure he won’t try again, but he’s lost the spark of mad genius that prompted him to run that bath. Instead, he watches Patty drift around like a ghost, trying to make him comfortable. He can’t tell her why.

She already thinks he’s had a mental break. How does he explain ‘a man-eating eldritch monster took the shape of a clown and terrorized me through my childhood’ is what drove him to this? He already sounds crazy in his own head, and yes, they think he is but he can come back from that.

He can turn things around, beg their forgiveness.

They will have mercy on him, because they don’t know why he did it.

He sleeps. He doesn’t dream. It’s the first time in years he hasn’t had an unexplainable night terror. It fills him with a sort of quiet hope that the others succeeded, but he won’t know for sure. They’ll never forgive him for abandoning them, for removing himself to increase their chances at killing It for good.

He’s okay with that, he decides. He kept his promise as best he could.

* * *

“You have visitors,” Patty tells him, a few days later.

His hands are unbound, and he’s quietly piecing together a puzzle she brought for him, while they observe him to see if he will reach for something sharp once more. He has been a model patient, moved from hospital to private care, just on the other side of a mental ward.

He knows he could be admitted if he wants.

Strangely, he doesn’t want it. He feels like he’s finally thinking clearly.

“My parents…?” he asks.

She shakes her head. “No. They called me when you…well, when I found you.”

Stan feels icy cold all over.

“No,” he says.

“Stan,” she says. Her voice is gentle, but he’s lived with and loved this woman so fiercely for fifteen years—he knows her tone. “They flew a long way to see you.”

“Babylove—”

“Stanley.” She cups his face. They haven’t had this conversation, he knows it’s coming and he still flinches from it like a train flashing out of a tunnel in front of him, horn blaring.

_Hey kids, wanna see a dead body?_

“I can’t,” he whispers.

“You should,” she says, softly. She presses a kiss to his forehead, his eyelids. To the tears that are leaking unbidden from the corners of his eyes. “They love you almost as much as I do.”

He knows, and that’s why he can’t.

“I won’t force you,” she says.

He takes a breath, feels it strangling in his throat. The room is pressing in on him, much like it did when he hung up the phone with Mike the first time. He hates this feeling, but he knows that they won’t go away.

Losers never—

“Send in…send him in.” Stan breathes out. He can’t seem to get air but she nods, she knows. She kisses his forehead, the corner of his mouth, and she steps out, making eye contact with someone across the hall.

Stanley closes his eyes.

He can’t bear it. The minutes are interminable, seconds ticking by slowly. He knows something has changed, can hear the click of the door shutting. He can’t look.

He must. He knows.

When he opens his eyes, Big Bill Denbrough is standing beside the door, looking smaller than Stan has ever seen him. It’s not just his height, although it would amuse him, outwardly, that even he has gotten taller than their big brother. It’s the way he holds himself, hunched inward as he looks at Stan from across the room, eyes big and dark and red-rimmed.

He looks haggard, as though he has not slept in weeks; hollowed out with a spoon, all his insides scooped out and replaced with air. A white streak through his hair, as though someone had touched it and sucked all of the color from just that hank. Pulling his life force away a strand at a time, it hangs longer than he remembers. Gone are the short cuts of Bill’s youth, replaced with a haggard scruffiness that fits and yet doesn’t, like a coat that’s two sizes too big and too long in the sleeves.

But it _is_ Bill Denbrough. Stan would know him anywhere. Even when he had forgotten, he is sure that seeing Bill in the street would make him stop short. A tug, just behind his ribs, a hook to pull him in, bring him back where he belongs.

The same is true of the other Losers. He knows them. He _Knows_ them.

And they Know him.

For a long moment, Stan’s harsh breathing is all that can be heard. The sight of Bill is almost too much, like staring into the sun, but Stan can’t stop looking.

Bill clears his throat.

“Stan,” he starts.

Stan interrupts. “I’m—”

Bill crosses the room in long strides, almost running, and he scoops Stan into a hug, as tight as he can, as though afraid that Stan will slip away again if he doesn’t. Stan’s hands come up, fisting themselves in the material of Bill’s jacket, and they cling together, breathing heavily, as though they’d both just run a mile uphill.

“Bill,” Stan says, his voice thick.

“Don’t,” Bill says, pulling back and pressing his forehead to Stan’s. “Shut up.”

“But—”

“Stan.” Bill’s voice is soft, pitched low, keening with pain. “We almost lost you.”

“I’m sorry,” Stan says. Bill shakes his head, cuffing him roughly on the shoulder.

“You and your chess master plays,” Bill says. “Was that wh-wh-what this was?”

The stutter has faded, but it is not completely gone. It cements that Bill is here, Bill is all right. He is all right. They have made it. He squeezes his eyes shut.

“I don’t…” Stan huffs a breath, ashamed at being caught out so easily. He sighs. “I thought it would help.”

“It fucking didn’t,” Bill says, but he’s smiling when Stan looks again. “But you’re here. We’ve got you. You’ve got us.”

Stan can’t help but smile back, thumbing self-consciously at the bandages on his wrists.

Bill looks over his shoulders. “Can I get the others?”

Stan swallows, looking down at himself. It’s not his best look, but maybe…it doesn’t matter. He nods.

Bill grins, presses his lips to Stan’s forehead. There’s a blessing in there, perhaps.

_May God turn toward you, and grant you peace._

One by one, they shuffle in, staring at him as though they can’t quite believe he’s there. Ben and Beverly, hand in hand. Mike behind them. Eddie. Last but not least, Richie, taller than almost all of them and rubbing at his eyes like he’s got something in them.

Stan’s smile hurts his face. It’s fragile and he hates it, but it’s there. That’s a start.

“Look at this guy,” Richie says. “Heard they tied you to the bed. Is that your way of getting out of victory hand jobs?”

“ _Beep-beep_ , dumbass!” Eddie hisses, elbowing him in the side.

But Stan laughs.

“You dumb—”

It’s something foreign sounding, as though coming from a long way off; a genuine belly laugh, making his ribs ache in the best way. It frees him, something around his heart dropping away like a scale that’s built up. It hurts. It hurts and it _hurts_ and it feels so **_good_** , he can’t **_stand_** it.

“Rich—"

He hiccups, keeps laughing. It goes high, hysterical, and he can’t stop.

“Fuck—"

Suddenly, he’s sobbing, and they all swarm the bed, clinging to him as hard as he’s clinging to them. They grip his shirt, hug his arms, keep him grounded until he can claw his way back to equilibrium. He fists his hand in Eddie’s jacket, Eddie’s got a grip on his hand. Bev’s curled up on the bed with him, mashed in between Ben and Mike. Richie’s got his other arm, Stan’s got a crushing grip on his hand, but Richie’s only got eyes for him. Stan’s got his ear pressed against Bill’s chest, consumed with the sound of Bill’s pounding heart.

It’s a wild moment, spanning hours and minutes and seconds, all at once.

He sucks in ragged breaths, as though he and the others were competing to see who could hold their air underwater in the quarry again. He can’t breathe, he can’t _breathe_. The green-black water of the quarry is deep and dark, but it is _nothing_ compared to the hands that grip him and pull him upward.

Stanley Uris surfaces.

He settles.

He inhales, exhales, matching Bill and Bev, feeling Richie’s knuckles creak in his grip. He eases back, slowly withdrawing.

They don’t let him go.

They never did.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. His throat is hoarse. Funny, that.

“Shut the fuck up,” Eddie says. His brown eyes lock on Stan’s. “Shut the absolute fuck up.”

Stan feels a giggle bubble up; it makes him a little lightheaded.

“Stan the man,” Mike says. His hand cups the back of Stan’s neck, and he bends his head to Stan’s, pressing their foreheads together.

He is here.

He is whole.

The hush breaks, and there’s a murmur of conversation around him, happy and quiet. He breathes in, breathes out. The rush of Bill’s heart is in his ear. He is here.

He looks over to the door. Patty stands there, her hand over her mouth. There are tears rolling down her face but he can tell that she knows, now.

He thinks she might understand.

He reaches out to her, and she comes forward, joining the circle. Bev makes room on the bed, and there’s a completion in the way she and Patty hug without awkwardness; there’s a rightness in introductions seeming unnecessary. She’s important to Stan, this makes her important to them. His family has come together.

He looks up at the ceiling and smiles.

Stanley Uris is alive.

It is a good thing to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Seven, Richie thought. That's the magic number. There has to be seven of us. That's the way it's supposed to be._ ― Stephen King, It


	6. Eddie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eddie’s wedding photos are not on display in his home. He doesn’t mind—he’s in so few of them anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 
>       
>     
>     
>     _Sit down, breathe and just listen
>     Hey baby, baby
>     I've been gone I've been gone I've been so far gone lately
>     I know it's bad when we look out
>     But bad, bad people
>     Don't live in our house
>     So i'm gonna look good for you honey
>     Get my myself together spend you all of my money
>     I know it's hard enough to love me
>     But woke up in a safe house singing honey let's get married_
>     
>     -- Bleachers, "Let's Get Married"
>     
>     
>     

Eddie’s wedding photos are not on display in his home. They are carefully tucked away into an album on a clean white shelf, the cream-colored book untouched by roving hands and time or the damaging brush of the sun.

He doesn’t mind—he’s in so few of them anyway.

If he’d had his choice, he wouldn’t have taken them at all; it seemed like a waste of money at the time. Myra had insisted, in that insidiously sweet way that she had, bulling over his preferences with her own carefully researched information.

_They would want the memories, wouldn’t they, Eddie-bear? You’ll look so handsome in your suit, it’s something I’ll cherish. Please, for me?_

Arguing with Myra is a war of attrition for every scrap of ground and every concession, and Eddie is not equipped for the best of times, much less a siege about wedding photographers. It’s not even really an argument, per se; Myra has a way of twisting things into hurt that wasn’t there when Eddie says the words, she takes things so hard and so personally that he just can’t bring himself to lay down boundaries and healthy space. She crowds him, clean hands cupping his face as she tells him how things are going to be but worded in a way that he can swallow just fine.

In the end, it hadn’t been worth it, and he’d caved when he realized that her parents were paying for it specifically. It was some of his only input on the wedding, and it was shot down with such a merciless artistry that it had set the stage for the days and weeks and years to come.

He’d flipped through the photos, once, when they’d arrived from the photographer. He counted the number of photographs that he’d been in, realizing then that it had been less about him than about Myra’s big day.

Less than half. Less than half of half.

He feels like he was in most of them, only to find that he was not, in fact, in a majority. Group shots, one of just the bride and her groom, and a family photo with his new in-laws.

There always seems to be something missing from the wedding party, regardless.

It’s not that he doesn’t have friends—okay no, not _friends_ , acquaintances, people he sees at mixers and company parties and corporate functions—but his side of the church had been empty in a way that had stung, like an insult flung in friendly banter that wasn’t meant to cut but instead slices deep, like sea glass that hadn’t quite been worn down by the press of the waves. He’d come down on the sand of that realization with a bare heel, and the stab into tender flesh had never really knit correctly. He walked through that wedding with an emotional limp.

Perhaps that’s why his eyes are flat in the photos, why his smile is small and barely there, hardly genuine.

No one notices. That cuts even deeper.

It wasn’t a bad wedding, as far as he remembers. It’s not the shitshow that Jake in accounting had, where the best man slept with the bride the night before in drunken stupor—no, Eddie should be so lucky but his best man was Myra’s brother and there was no time to find—

He strains to think on it, but the question eludes him, because he can’t even think about what to ask. Like he’s been given three wishes but he knows that if he doesn’t word it just right the genie will fuck him over hard and he’ll regret everything.

There was no objection when the pastor had asked.

The church had been eerily silent, like it and the congregation had been holding its breath. There was no clamor from the doorway, no last minute save, no desperate declaration of love. It was not a movie. It was real life, and Eddie had learned early that real life was often disappointing.

He had no idea why the thought had struck him, looking over the church and seeing his half empty save for a handful of coworkers who disliked him just slightly less than the others. There was a gap there, a hole where something—no someone, some _ones_ —should be, but he couldn’t figure out why the feeling was such a punch to the gut.

Five—no, six. _**Was**_ it six? His head was hurting, a migraine building in the base of his skull and thumping to the beat of a tinny _Treulich geführt_ that had long since faded with Myra’s walk down the aisle on her father’s arm.

_Speak now, or forever hold your peace._

Eddie kept his words behind his teeth, said the vows that Myra had typed up for him six months before, and smiled carefully for photographs he did not want. He spent the reception fielding congratulations from Myra’s aunts and uncles and grandparents, self-conscious and knowing his mother never would have come to this. Too many germs, too many opportunities to get hurt, and he was already feeling sick.

Myra had noticed, and they’d escaped to the limo early, arm and arm. She’d put him to bed that night with an aspirin and a cold pack. He hadn’t reached for her in the night and she hadn’t seemed to expect it.

The shame he felt hadn’t ever really receded; Eddie just gets better at dealing with it by ignoring it, letting it pile up behind him like the detritus of the rest of his childhood. If he doesn’t look, he doesn’t see the way the pile teeters on the verge of toppling, spilling repressed feelings like the ashes of a garbage fire.

Myra put the photos in the album, slotted it away on the shelf, and went about decorating the home he bought for her, spending his money on kitsch and knickknacks.

He doesn’t mind. It makes her happy. That’s his job.

He tells himself that, and he ignores the cream-colored album that sits at eye level in his home office. There’s a copy in Myra’s little sewing room, but he doesn’t touch that, either. It doesn’t feel real, though he knows it was, he was there. He feels the weight of his wedding band on his finger. He pays a mortgage, for Christ’s sake.

He puts it from his mind, carefully shoves the feeling in a bottle and tosses it behind him like a Molotov of repression. Eventually, one of those bottles are going to light up his psyche, but until then, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

* * *

Derry comes calling.

All the bottles light at once.

Eddie is on fire from the inside out and there’s nothing that’s going to extinguish the blaze. He’s just going to have to let himself burn out.

Everything comes crashing down, burning in earnest as he fetches his token. All the pain and fear evaporate in the face of an overwhelming fury. It ignites in his chest, the sleeping coal flaring to life. How dare It. How dare It take the people he loves? How dare It make him forget the people who sealed a hole in his chest the second he laid eyes on them again?

Eddie has always been angry. It has always felt weak and useless and trite, nothing that could be done, a puppy snarling in reflex but with no strength to its jaws. As a child, he’d been constrained by his mother and his own limitations, his fear that he was not enough, that he was too small and too weak and _delicate_. He broke his arm, and that was an excuse. _You see, Eddie, this is why you must stay home. Things are so dangerous._

And he is _furious_ about it. He never made friends again, never **wanted** them, not when he had the Losers and nothing he tried to do in college and adult life had ever compared to summers full of comics and laughter and games and his very best friends.

His brain fills with memories of Bill and Richie and Stan and Mike and Bev and Ben and he’s shaking with an anger that has been building for thirty years and has only now found its proper target. He loved them. He loves them. He loves them and he **_loves_** them and he is so angry that he forgot, he’s so terrified he’ll lose them again after he just got them back.

Richie dangles like a puppet with the strings cut, mouth agape and eyes rolled back into his head. He’s caught in the Deadlights and that fear consumes Eddie, gnaws on his guts and he knows the feeling, but he also knows he can break it. He can do it.

He knows he can.

_They’re gazebos, they’re bullshit!_

And that’s it. It’s always been about belief. About that wild, free feeling in your chest when you know, **_you know_** that nothing can stop you. It makes him feel light-headed, weightless, his fatigue melting away in the face of the revelation and he—

“Beep-beep, motherfucker!”

He pours his rage into his throw, but he also pours in his fear and his uncertainty and his love. His love for his friends and himself and his life now that he’s found them again. He never wants to give them up again and he’s not going to let It have them. None of them.

The spear is silver. It’s wormwood, it’s deadly nightshade. It’s battery acid. It’s neurotoxin, it’s radioactive and venomous and explosive, it will kill anything it pierces.

Because he believes it will.

The being howls an unearthly scream as his strike lands, and Richie drops, folding awkwardly against the stone floor as It writhes above him in crushing agony. He slides to a stop beside his best friend, kneeling over him and slapping Richie gently across the face.

Richie blinks up at him, myopic in the shutterflash of the lights that dance around them, and Eddie grins through tears. He has him. For once in their lives, their roles are reversed and he’s looking after Richie, getting him safe and getting him away.

“Hey, easy, there he is,” he croons, and Richie’s face is soft, staring up at Eddie in wonder. The feeling is a rush Eddie’s never known, and he rolls with it, basking in the expression as he fists his hands in Richie’s shirt. “I got It, Rich, I think I—”

* * *

He can’t lift his arms above his shoulders for six months. At least. All told, it’s a small price to pay for finally ending the terror of his childhood and throwing a fucking spear right through Its face.

The Losers are his shadows, all of them hovering by his bed the first day or so. Bill and Mike take turns making food runs. Bev and Ben coordinate visits and his friends rotate in and out of the hospital as they clean themselves up and make preparations to separate once Eddie is cleared to leave the hospital.

Richie refuses to leave the chairs he’s pilfered from the waiting room, one at a time. He’s sleeping on them and it’s annoying because Eddie knows it can’t be comfortable, but there’s a sort of ache that has nothing to do with the hole in his shoulder as he wakes one night to see Richie slung over them like a gangly scarecrow, fast asleep despite his face mashed into hard plastic and his glasses askew.

This is a new feeling, something soft and quiet and warm as he watches the rise and fall of Richie’s chest. The longer they stay in Derry, the more they get back, and Eddie isn’t sure sometimes that a new feeling is exactly new. He thinks perhaps he has felt this before, but it’s muted, pressed in amber and locked away, never to see the light of day.

He pockets it to examine later.

He’s looked at by doctors from Derry and they determine that while it’s a nasty hole in his shoulder, and he’s somehow broken his collarbone, he’s relatively intact, all things considered. They also seem to overlook what caused the injury, only seeking to mend the damage. For that, Eddie is grateful. What would he have said? What would any of them have said?

Instead, he works on piecing his life together after Derry.

Bev bullies Richie into going back to the Inn and showering, and for that, Eddie is properly grateful. Sewer is a distinct smell and he’s tired of it. While he does, she sits with him and they talk about the future.

He is also properly grateful for that. He doesn’t think it would have been so easy with anyone but Bev. They share that portion of their lives, even while he hates it for the both of them. She commiserates with him and he finds solace in his friends again and again and again. She kisses his cheek, where a fresh scar is forming, and his heart is full by the time Mike comes back with Richie in tow, real food in their hands.

They eat like kings and he falls asleep with a full belly, to the sound of Richie and Mike arguing the merits of Star Wars versus Babylon 5; the rise and fall of their conversation lulls him into unconsciousness with a speed that might be surprising if he were able to appreciate it.

While he heals, he plans. He sets up his next steps, makes lists and sets dates and writes reminders in the calendar on his new phone (god bless Bill Denbrough). He has woken from the longest sleep of his life and he’s done being a passenger on the train of his existence. He’s traveled through the darkest tunnel and the September sun is warm on his face.

Eddie Kaspbrak is alive.

It is a good thing to be.

* * *

He doesn’t believe it’s an exaggeration that moving to LA is a big step. It is, he knows it is, but the anxiety he would usually feel is muted as he and Mike pack up the last of the cardboard boxes. Bill and Ben are helping load his car, because he still can’t lift his arms and he’s still fucking pissed about it, but it’s better than being dead, even if pacing himself is killing him faster than the fucking clown ever tried to do.

Myra had not gone meekly into that good night, no sir. It was not, however, a war of attrition. No, this time, he has help. Bev and Bill are his knights, swooping in and helping him clean out his meager belongings, leaving her knickknacks and bric-a-brac and tchotchkes to gather dust in their sterile townhome. Bev’s divorce lawyer is willing to take on his case, and he knows that this is ugly and he hates it, hates the pain it’s causing—

But sometimes one must take on a little pain to grow past it.

Bone heals, becomes solid, thicker where it mends. Eddie is resolved, his anger melting down to a laser-sharp point that focuses on the West Coast and a new job.

Let his old boss think it was a mid-life crisis. He could handle that, and really, it’s not Eddie’s responsibility to explain it to him. He didn’t have enough crayons for it, anyway.

Mike is coming with him, eager to see the sights during their drive, and Bev and Ben are flying out to help open up and clean the little two-bedroom house he found. He’d put in an offer, had it accepted, and that was that. He’ll take possession of the keys when he arrives. He has enough after splitting his assets down the middle, he can afford it. He’ll bounce back in six months.

Amazing, he thinks, as he hugs Bill hard before he climbs into the car, what one finds one can endure if one is really pushed towards it.

* * *

Mike and Eddie make good time, trading off the driving and stopping for meals. Their way wends leisurely through the United States, though they don’t often take back roads or side stops. Still, it’s new for them both, seeing places that they didn’t know existed or even read about when they were kids. Eddie has been out of the country, has seen Kyoto and Seoul and London, but they were muted behind plate glass and meetings that droned on.

This? This is entirely different, and he and Mike become sort of tourists, stopping at roadside stands and buying fruit, grabbing souvenirs they think the others will like. Eddie nearly inhales a bushel of strawberries in Arkansas, the juice dripping down his chin while the miles eat away beneath the Escalade’s tires. He buys a t-shirt at the museum in Fayetteville, a racing biplane that proclaims it to be from the air museum in the curls of skywriting that trail off the chest. He’s not owned anything like it since he was a kid but it feels right, and he pulls it over his head when they leave the motel the next day and Mike grins at him like the kids they used to be.

It feels right.

The highway rolls on, and sometimes it feels endless, even with the books on tape Mike has downloaded and the countless playlists Bill and Ben and Bev send them. Long stretches are full of nothing but dark roads, and while it should scare the ever-living shit out of him, he can’t help but feel peace, looking at the stars that spin above them like a pale speckled blanket. The road could never end and yet Eddie could be content with it.

Well, almost.

There’s a restless energy beneath his skin, the closer that they get to Los Angeles. It starts somewhere around the Grand Canyon, burrowing into his bones like an electric current. It tingles down his spine, chasing him and keeping him awake, keeps him staring out at the desert as they get closer to Vegas, watching the stars spin above them as the narrator reads.

> _“Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences.”_

It’s true, Eddie thinks as he half-listens, watching the sand meld into cacti and scrub while the stars wheel overhead.

But isn’t that what a mid-life crisis is about?

* * *

Los Angeles does not creep up on them, but it does sort of appear all at once, even as they come down through Barstow. It is a sprawling place, not at all like the towering and compact Manhattan that Eddie is used to.

Mike pulls to a stop at the rest area, and they both stand there, sharing a packet of dried fruit between them.

“You ready for this?” Mike asks, nodding down at the lights that are just starting to go on in the dusk that’s falling over them. The sun is setting, and it’s painting the whole area in lurid reds and oranges, deepening to purple the longer that they stand here like fucking tourists. It’s warm here, and Eddie can appreciate that more than anything right now. It’s a heat, nice as it soaks into him while a warm wind ruffles at his hair.

“If I’m not now, will I ever be?” Eddie asks in return. Mike chews on his bit of apple, nodding as he thinks.

“I’m proud of you, you know,” he says. He and Eddie are tired but here, they made it safely. That’s enough for Eddie, who grins down at the parking lot and rubs the back of his neck. “I mean it. You took a big leap.”

“Well.” Eddie flushes and hates it, hates that he’s still embarrassed by it, but he grabs Mike in a side-hug that turns into a real hug, the type where he feels his bones creak. “Fuck you too.”

Mike only laughs, deep and fond.

* * *

Richie discovers he has moved within the week. There is a leak somewhere in the Losers supply chain, but Eddie can’t really blame them. It was bound to happen.

He just doesn’t want it to be strange, doesn’t want to make it weird or a thing or—or a complex. He’s done letting his neuroses dictate his life and he’s learning to live with himself in a way that was foreign and terrifying when he finally left Derry as a young man. Now, though, he accepts the fear, lets it wash over him and through him. Now, he’s here and present.

He expects the reprisal, but he chose his battle well. Richie is in negotiations for another special, and that means he’s out of town on a whirlwind of meetings and other shenanigans that don’t let him focus on the Losers like he normally would. Eddie uses the transient nature of Richie’s profession against him, and he’s unpacked and well into a routine long before the Trashmouth comes calling.

He wants his defenses well in place before he sees him again.

It’s a bit like armor, a bit like fortifications, more like preparation for a storm. He’s battening what hatches he can before Hurricane Tozier comes and blows out his windows.

It takes Richie three weeks to get back into town, and by then Eddie is meal-prepping and taking daily runs. He’s found a route he likes, found a place that sells amazing produce on the weekends, found a place that deals in alternatives to quinoa.

He never could stomach the stuff, once he read about the farmers who were forced to give up a staple. Nothing made Eddie angrier than unfairness, these days.

His ring has been gone for four months, tucked into a box in a safety deposit slot at his local bank. He’s not going to go for it, but it’s not really worth much. He keeps it, perhaps, as a reminder. Out of sight, out of mind, save for the pale strip of skin on his finger.

He’s settled into his job, he likes his coworkers. He’s friendly with them but not too close. It’s comfortable.

He’s comfortable.

Richie Tozier bangs on his door at noon on the third Sunday he’s lived in LA properly. Eddie is expecting it, mostly because he got the heads up from Bill that Richie had signed on to work with him on his new movie and that means that his time is free and so—

He opens the door to find Richie hovering on his doormat.

“Hey—” Eddie says, but that’s all he gets before Richie’s hugging him, nearly picking him up. Eddie’s on tiptoe, arms around Richie in return, squashed against the taller Loser’s chest. He inhales, and his head buzzes with the scent of Richie, something masculine and not exactly sweaty, but definitely travel-stained about him.

Richie breathes in and then lets Eddie go, big hands finding purchase on Eddie’s shoulders.

“Sorry,” he says, hoarse. “We just haven’t—”

They haven’t talked.

Eddie knows that’s just as much his fault as it is Richie’s; phones work both ways.

He breathes in, feeling his chest swell with a quiet affection for the man in front of him. He steps aside, tugging Richie into the house, shutting and locking the door behind him while grousing at him to take off his shoes while he’s inside, dammit. Richie bemusedly toes off his sneakers, socked feet quiet on the tile of the floor as he follows Eddie into the living room.

Eddie gestures to the couch and Richie sort of looks like he doesn’t want to break anything as he folds himself onto it, long legs compacted as he settles in. It looks wrong, Richie is larger than life, always has been; it’s been a fact of life to Eddie as long as he’s known him, even when they were both scared and small.

“I’m sorry I didn’t call,” Eddie says, settling on the other end. “I just…wanted to feel a little normal, before—”

“I get it,” Richie says. He grins, something lopsided that always made Eddie’s heart speed in his chest. “I just figured I’d check out your new digs so I could invite myself over for pizza and beer.”

“Fuck you, Rich,” Eddie says, though it’s through a smile. He’s missed him.

Richie just grins wider, something mischievous and a little wild. It reminds Eddie why he’s there in the first place.

He’s in love with Richie. It’s part of the remembering, the little pearls of memories that dropped back into his head in the days he spent healing up post-Derry. It’s pathetic, moving across the country on the whim and at the drop of a hat, post-divorce.

But isn’t that what a mid-life crisis is about?

He remembers now, the hammock in patchy sunlight, pressed together, colt-like limbs tangling as they read or bickered or both. How almost all of his memories feature Richie, how he feels safe with the other close by. It’s enough. Being in the same city, it’s enough.

“What made you decide LA?” Richie asks, though Eddie can’t place his tone. It’s careful, as though Richie is fishing for information. But the Trashmouth has never been subtle, jokes like sledgehammers and humor like a sucker punch, and so Eddie answers easily enough.

“It’s a world away from New York, for starters,” Eddie says. Richie seems to relax—or to deflate, but Eddie’s not sure on that. “I had a few job prospects out here, so I followed up. I almost chose Barcelona instead.”

“Hooking up with senoritas, you have my approval,” Richie says, grinning. There’s something flat about his eyes, though.

“Nah,” Eddie says. “But I thought that this would be nice, because it means that we don’t have to go too far for Christmas and Thanksgiving.”

“We?” Richie asked.

“Well, yeah, we’re doing it this year with Bill and Audra in Palo Alto, right?”

“Oh, yeah,” Richie says.

“You completely forgot,” Eddie says. The way Richie cuts his eyes to Eddie speaks volumes. “How do you keep track of anything?”

“I wait for Bev—”

“To yell at you, yes, I know,” Eddie says, sighing.

Richie grins. “I missed the fuck out of you, Eds.”

“I missed you, too, dumbass.” He levels a flat stare at Richie. “And don’t call me that.”

* * *

Richie takes him to his favorite Indian place two weeks later. It smells good, with lots of vegetarian options, which makes Eddie side eye Richie as though he’s grown a second head.

Richie then proceeds to pop a fried potato thing he calls _bonda_ in his mouth and Eddie sees he was mistaken. He sighs, running his spoon through his curry sauce, but some things never change.

At least he has that.

The food is _incredible_.

* * *

It’s been six months and a handful of days since Eddie moved to LA. It’s been…comfortable, coming home in a way that he’s never really been able to describe. Having Richie close is nice, though his tours keep him on the road a lot. He always knows when Richie’s in town, though, and they make time.

That’s what friends do.

He and Richie text, but no more than he and the other Losers text. The group chat lights up at all hours, especially when Richie is done with a show and full of energy that he uses to shitpost at them until the wee hours.

It’s become almost a ritual to plan dinner around Richie showing up, twelve-pack of beer in hand. They spend the evening in arguments over every little thing, verbal slapfights that are less fights and more just the way they love each other. Eddie has never had more fun than when he shuts down a Richie rant, and Richie has always loved pushing his buttons.

He’s in one such argument now, his legs slung over Richie’s, socked feet swaying as he makes his point.

“I’m just saying, you keep using all that tired shit, you’re gonna sound old, Rich. I thought you were writing new material?” Eddie uses his beer bottle to point at Richie, feeling warm and liquid in a way that being happy drunk has always made him feel. He waggles the neck at Richie. “I always thought you were funnier than those specials, anyway.”

Richie puts a mock-offended hand over his heart. “I’m always funny, Eduardo.”

“No, you aren’t,” Eddie says, fixing him with a wavering stare. He’s not three sheets to the wind but he’s got at least one flapping away, his consonants running together. “You’re funnier when you’re being yourself, not that asshole on stage.”

“So, what I’m getting out of this ad hominem attack is that you think I’m funny,” Richie says instead.

“If you tell anyone I’ll destroy you,” Eddie says, seriously.

“Well, I take you at your word,” Richie says, but Eddie isn’t so far gone he doesn’t catch his hand snaking for his phone.

Eddie screeches and rolls, diving for it, and ends up backhanding it into the wall in the ensuing struggle. Richie is howling with laughter, and Eddie ends up on top of him on the couch, sitting on his stomach and digging his fingers into Richie’s ribs. Yeah, it’s not fair, it’s _not_ , but Eddie’s never played fair a day in his life and he’s not about to start now, not when Richie is looking up at him with tears of laughter in his eyes, hair mussed and glasses askew.

Eddie feels like he’s flying. He’s never been brave, but Richie says he is; Richie must see something in him that he doesn’t, but in this moment it’s obvious. It’s so obvious and it’s so easy to slow his hands, smoothing them over Richie’s chest, splaying his palm over Richie’s racing heart.

They stop, panting, staring at each other.

Their mouths crash together so hard their teeth click, but Eddie doesn’t care—Richie kisses like he’s drowning, licking into his mouth like he’s trying to taste the beer on Eddie’s tongue and Eddie keens when one of Richie’s hands snakes up his back, big palm spidering on the bare skin beneath his shirt.

He loves him. He loves him wildly, feeling Richie hiss against his mouth as he presses down against Richie, for all intents and purposes just trying to feel Richie everywhere. He loves him dazedly, when Richie flips them, covering him in mouthed kisses, leaving marks against his neck with his teeth.

He loves him, completely, especially when Richie pulls back, straightening his glasses and cupping Eddie’s face.

“Are you sure?” Richie asks, and Eddie has never loved anyone like he loves Richie Tozier in that moment, because he reaches up and pulls him down to him. He’s never been surer of anything in his life.

* * *

Eddie’s second wedding photos are on display _everywhere_. A leak to the paparazzi means that news outlets talk about nothing else for a good week afterward, but Eddie can’t find it in himself to care. He’s too busy putting the albums together. Almost every shot has the Losers present – the ones he loves the most.

Stan and Mike, laughing, their arms thrown over each other’s shoulders, Stan’s other arm around Patty, who’s laughing just as hard. They’d been teasing someone, but damned if Eddie could remember who. Still, they’re happy, and that’s the best part of the memory.

Bill and Bev, shoulder to shoulder as they pour more shots for everyone, the light of challenge in their faces. Ben’s just over their shoulders, bringing more alcohol.

Bev and Patty dancing to something poppy and utterly nineties, that Eddie might or might not have insisted that they play because it made them all boo him. It had been worth it.

Ben and Mike, blazers off and shirt sleeves rolled up, having a pushup contest because they could, and because champagne makes you do fucking stupid things when you’re drinking gallons of it.

The next shot is Richie ruining it by trying to sit on them both while they do.

Page after page, photo after photo, it’s a book full of memories that he doesn’t regret making.

Eddie’s eyes crinkle at the corners as he flips through the album, until he finds the ones he was looking for, right in the middle.

Bill, looking for all the world like he’s trying not to break down, walking Eddie up the aisle. Bev, grinning at him as he steps forward to take his place.

Richie’s expression as he cups Eddie’s face, his lip wobbling as he takes him in. The eyes that never leave him as they make each other the biggest promise, that they’re in this for the long haul. The way Richie tugs him in and kisses him, once he’s told he can.

And the very best one, Richie, cake smeared across his face, as Eddie laughs at him. It’s his favorite, because Richie is laughing too. He presses his fingers against the glossy plastic that protects the photos, aware that he’s smiling like a dope but unable to find it in him to care.

Being married to Richie Tozier tended to do that.

Eddie pulls the photo from its casing, scanning it into his laptop, and then replaces it. Christmas cards are easy this year.

He closes the little black album, and replaces it on the coffee table, where it belongs. Sometimes, he just flips through it, when he misses his friends or Richie’s on tour and he can’t get away.

In each and every picture, Eddie’s smile reaches his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eddie and Mike are listening to Neil Gaiman read The Graveyard Book while driving to California.
> 
> Rounding the corner to the finish. Just one more. Thank you for reading.


	7. Richie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He could have been a bully. If not for the Losers, he might have been. They render him normal, give him a scale to which to measure himself, a sounding board to bounce off of, skittering into laughter or _beep-beep_ when it becomes too much. Eventually he figures it out himself, learns to tweak it. But there’s always the look towards them, the validation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 
>       __
>     
>     
>     _I'm a liar, I'm a cynic
>     I'm a sinner, I'm a saint
>     I'm a loser, I'm a critic
>     I'm the ghost of my mistakes
>     And it's all my fault that I'm still the one you want
>     What are you after?
>     Some kind of disaster, yeah
>     
>     I woke up from a never-ending dream
>     I shut my eyes at 17
>     I lost every moment in between_
>     
>     -- All Time Low, "Some Kind of Disaster"
>     
>     
>     

He has always craved attention.

It is never outwardly, explicitly stated, but it’s been this way since he’s been a kid. He doesn’t know why, but there’s a hole, just between his ribs, and it’s a deep black hole with the gravitational pull of a dying star. He needs attention on him, and it doesn’t matter how.

He turns to jokes.

It’s easy, as a kid. Find what makes people laugh, beat it like a dead horse, repeat. As he gets older, it’s harder. People don’t seem to tolerate buffoonery and sarcasm goes over people’s heads and slices a hard right into _you’re being an asshole_ territory.

He’s labeled obnoxious, hyperactive, the class clown. He doesn’t care, they’re looking at him, and they’re laughing. Not _at_ him, but _with_ him. That’s what matters. They _see_ him, they see him and not the rotten core of him, the part on the inside that’s awful and abhorrent, that part of him that he clutches to his chest when he turns twelve and shoves deep down inside himself.

He could have been a bully. If not for the Losers, he might have been. They render him normal, give him a scale to which to measure himself, a sounding board to bounce off of, skittering into laughter or _beep-beep_ when it becomes too much. Eventually he figures it out himself, learns to tweak it. But there’s always the look towards them, the validation.

It comes from Bill, with his easy grin and bounced shoves of his shoulders. The slow sweep of Stan’s smile, sharp and sarcastic when one of Richie’s jokes land dead center. Bev with her high, bright laugh, a bray where she feels comfortable – and he loves that laugh, it makes her real and warm and alive, her eyes bright. Mike’s snorts coupled with a grin, then a wider one when Richie pushes it. Ben’s shocked, surprised laughter, red going up his neck and ears when Richie’s turned on him and teasing him.

Eddie’s furtive, quiet smiles. Like he wants to laugh but he doesn’t want to encourage Richie. Like he really does think he’s funny. The spark behind big brown eyes, lips twitching upward like he’s got a secret.

Richie’s got a secret too.

When he can make Eddie laugh, really laugh? That’s where he shines the brightest, like he’s gone supernova. The kid’s like a fucking oil painting, with his smooth olive skin and those big brown eyes, the sharp slash of his mouth softening as he looks over, dark hair falling into his face. High cheekbones are gonna make him a stunner when he’s older, but Richie’s focused on now, always now, the future a distant thought on the horizon (rushing forward, always rushing). The smiles are often, though Richie doesn’t think Eddie knows he’s doing it. The laughs? They’re like coveted gold, a junkie after his fix, and he chases them into high school.

He doesn’t stop. He _can’t_ , not at this point. He doesn’t know how to drop it, how to let people see him, to let them in. The Losers are the only ones who get close, unguarded moments where they see him, pink and weak and exposed. He covers quickly, hopes they don’t see too much.

He discovers standup when he’s fourteen, and spends his nights hunched over his notebook, carefully copying jokes that he hears, listening for how reactions hit. The bits and specials that air on TV are meticulously taped over, analyzed, and then the VHS is taped over when something new is going to air. (He goes through eight tapes like this, until George Carlin is overlaid with Robin Williams and Eddie Murphy and the sound all blends together in a cacophony of big names and bright stars.) He pays attention to how it makes him feel, that bright bubble of laughter when something catches him by surprise.

He learns the rota, the pattern, the patter. He overlays natural timing with practice, learning when to strike, a calculated bomb of injected humor so the whole table dissolves into helpless giggles. He gets written up for disruption, holds the slip up like a medal and marches himself down to the principal’s office, again.

He discovers Saturday Night Live, and now he doesn’t feel bad about not having a date on the weekend. Instead, he’s got the Not Ready for Prime-Time Players to guide him through something that lights a spark under his skin.

He’s convinced it’s a better kind of magic than whatever the fuck happened last summer. (He doesn’t talk about last summer.)

What’s more, he’s _good_ at it. This is a magic he controls, he can spellbind an audience with his words and frenetic energy, can keep them laughing and their eyes on him, without looking past the curtain.

He grows, launching up to a towering six-foot-one in his junior year, his limbs long and rangy as he gambols across the halls like a colt, unsteady still even as he is told he should try out for basketball. He doesn’t, preferring to stick to the sidelines. He’s not that brave, nor is he that coordinated.

Years pass. He graduates, and then he gets the news. He can leave, his parents are moving. It’s bittersweet, convinced he’s going to be stuck here forever, not minding entirely because of who he’s stuck with, and yet—he’s excited, wanting to see the wide world that he’s only ever had in snippets on a softly glowing television.

He moves from Derry, to El Segundo. He likes California, it’s warm. Burns away a lot of the crap he’d been holding onto since he was a kid, the sun painting him and burning him to a crisp his first summer working at a local pizza place. He causes riots in the kitchen with snappy comebacks and quick retorts, making his shifts fly by.

He’s in college by the time he realizes that he could make a career of this, if he wanted. He’ll have to work hard, but he’s not really doing anything else, and this English degree is gonna kill him if he has to read more essays.

He drops out.

His mother cries.

His life is in free-fall, like he’s jumped off a cliff (Has he done that? He remembers the feeling, vividly.) and is aiming for water below. Inches to the left or right are rocks, and he’ll splatter against them if he over-adjusts too much.

He works hard. Just not at jokes. Those are always easy. No, he bounds up on stage in his brilliant shirts with over-bright eyes and chapped hands because he’s just finished a shift scrubbing dishes. He holds down two jobs and hits the open mic nights like they’re going out of style, because he’s a junkie that needs his fix and the mic is the fastest way. It’s the most organic way, too, because he can see the crowd, work them like a herd, get them laughing and whooping and they _see_ him, the parts he wants them to see. The good parts, the great parts, what he’s the best at.

He sleeps on couches, crams himself in his car’s back seat, sleeps in an alleyway once. (Okay, twice.)

It pays off, when he’s twenty-three. He’s caught up to at the end of the night, by a guy who says he’s an agent and wants to represent him. Richie’s wary, but a couple of searches proves the card is legit and so is the guy, so he calls him a couple days later.

He gets his first show. His mother cries again. He hates that he made her worry. He’s good now. He’s good. He’s got this.

His star rises, because he’s one of those bleeding edge comics, not afraid to push boundaries and social mores. Frantic energy, like Robin Williams on cocaine; blunt and crass, like the very best of George Carlin, though with no motive or moral attached. It makes him powerful and palatable. Easy to package, to produce, but hard to replicate.

Shows and late-night bits and spots. Never SNL, they’ve lost their teeth since Farley died, he thinks, just a bit bitter and a lot sad. He doesn’t expect them to reach out to him. That’s okay. He doesn’t need them like he did when he was fourteen.

He’s got his name on the marquee now.

The rest is history, he thinks, standing backstage, waiting on his name to be called. Well, not his name. His stage name.

_Trashmouth_.

It fits, like a second skin, like coming home. Like being wrapped in a layer of safety before he goes out in front of those people and exposes his beating heart. They know what to expect from Trashmouth, he’s on, he’s there to entertain, he’s funny.

Richard Wentworth Tozier means nothing to them. No, it’s the stage presence that’s important. It’s working the crowd, it’s manipulating and tricking them into laughing, into enjoying his presence. Most of them wouldn’t know him from Adam if he shaved and got a haircut. That’s the point.

He’s Trashmouth.

The name is armor, it’s a sword. His lance to tilt at windmills. It’s something he remembers hearing, in a fugue state from his childhood. Like he was sick, for a long time, and that’s what drifted to the shore of his mind in a fever dream. He’s crafted a whole persona around it, jokes about sex and mockery of what people consider _good and decent_ but what Trashmouth knows are just shells to hide behind, because he does the same damn thing. And he signs off with the same thing every time.

_The fun’s just beginning_.

It’s his tagline, his promise that he will not stop, because you don’t know the magic words. You can’t make him, you won’t make him. He’s gonna go until you’re laughing too, or at least admit he’s good at what he does, despite your efforts.

No one knows the magic words. Not even Richie, anymore.

His phone buzzes in his pocket. At first, he ignores it, breathing in and out, nostrils flared as he preps to bound out onto stage. He’s got a good half hour, but he likes to watch the comics warm up the crowds, likes to feed off their energy to power him up, like a twisted psychic vampire. He doesn’t write his own material, hasn’t for years. That never really mattered, he found.

They laughed regardless. It was all in the delivery.

His phone buzzes again. He ignores it, focusing on the kid on stage. He’s nervous, and Richie can always tell, but he’s hiding it well. He’ll be big soon if he keeps it up.

A third time, his phone buzzes.

Grouchy, Richie pulls it from his pocket and stares down at the caller ID. Bile rises in his throat, burning at the back of his soft palate. He needs to—

He needs—

Oh god, he _needs_ —

He’s out the door, over the fire escape and hurling up whatever fancy takeout he’d crammed into himself before this show. He doesn’t remember, the weight of ages six to eighteen crashing down on him like an emotional blackout and shoving everything else aside, fear roiling into his guts and pushing them up and out and over onto the pavement below.

Poison in his veins and his skin is crawling with disgust, fingers touching him all over and he can’t breathe because eyes are on him without his permission and he’s—

His manager’s hand is on the small of his back and he jerks, almost jitters over the edge of the catwalk onto the pavement below and he’s like a scalded cat, claws and teeth and a puffed-out tail. He whips around, eyes wild, to catch his manager with his hands up, palms out. Peace. Calm down.

“Dude, what’s your deal?”

And he can’t explain, he could never explain to someone who’s never experienced it in his entire life, hearing voices from drains, not just friends but your **_own_** , hearing your own voice taunting you because It knows where you live. It knows you, too, what you’re most afraid of. Seeing things that aren’t real no matter where you go, where you run. It can always, always get you, It just hasn’t yet. It hasn’t decided to hunt _you_.

Looks like it’s time to pay the piper, though.

Richie Tozier needs a drink.

Derry is calling him home.

* * *

He doesn’t know how to explain it. Memories come back faster and faster. They start as a trickle when he hits LAX – not even sure why he’s going, just knowing that he _has_ to—he _promised_ , it thrums in his veins like a bump done right before a bit, his keys stained white and his sinuses burning. He hasn’t done coke in years; it was only ever a sometimes thing but when he woke up in someone else’s bathtub with the shower going he swore off the shit for good.

It never really helped, anyway. It mostly just made him level out while everyone else picked up the pace.

He does, however, chug two bourbons neat during his flight, the red-eye still not letting him catch any sleep. It’s fine. He wasn’t expecting to sleep again.

If he’s gonna die, he’s gonna go the way he lived – a closeted disaster of a human being on no fucking sleep whatsoever.

It’s poetic that way, or some shit, he thinks morosely. He debates a third bourbon, decides against it. His stomach roils unpleasantly as his plane speeds for the East Coast, and he almost wishes for the dubious security of his tour bus instead of the plane. He could at least have the place to himself, despite the snoring around him meaning that his nervous breakdown is going mostly unnoticed.

His hands sweat as memories continue to trickle into his brain like some sort of demonic hourglass, fear and loathing and despair clawing at his lizard hind-brain and making him twitch as he watches the lights below speed away. It’s too dark to watch for long and the in-flight options include most of his specials and he hates everyone and everything in that moment right now.

None of this is him.

He is a scared shitless thirteen-year-old boy, knees knocking in a sewer as he watches something dark grab his best friend. (Bill, he remembers with a judder of his thumb against the tray table, Big Bill Denbrough, the leader and the king of the Barrens, why has he forgotten?) He is fourteen and watching someone slip away from them, carried away in a car. (Beverly Marsh, fierce and beautiful and fearless, he remembers he loves her, his eyes burning as he stares out at the towns dotted below with tiny points of light.) He is sixteen and going stag because so is his other best friend. (Stan Uris, he thinks with a start, watching Chicago pass beneath him). He’s seventeen and watching a friend leave town, wishing to god he could go too. (Ben. Ben Hanscom. Why is this so hard, like forcing the last of the toothpaste from the tube?)

He is eighteen and he is leaving. He’s finally getting out of the hellhole that is Derry, Maine. Mike watches him leave, the cicadas screaming in the tall grass like they had something to prove, like he hadn’t screamed long and loud enough for everyone here. He hugs Mike hard, climbs into the car and goes. He doesn’t look back. (That’s not right. He did look back. The whole way. Why? There was someone else there. Who was it? Who? _Who_? It’s a chant in his brain like a psychotic owl as the plane begins to descend toward Bangor.)

It haunts him, like an itch beneath his skin as he rents a car in Bangor and starts to drive the rest of the way. He hits a pharmacy, loads up with whatever he thinks will help, and keeps going. Why does he do that, he never does that, he’s the king of unprepared—

He’s forgetting someone still, or failing to remember. Did they die? He can’t remember, and his eyes are red and itchy by the time he makes Derry town limits. He pulls off in the picnic area, pulls out a bottle of eye drops and lets the saline soothe him.

_Welcome home, Richie_.

His glasses are off. He can’t see. He’s blind and exposed and vulnerable, and he shoves them back on his face and whips around, like he expects someone in the back seat of the car.

There’s nothing.

He lets out a shaky, tense breath. God, he hates this place with every fiber of himself.

He turns back around, comes face to face with a red balloon, tied to his steering wheel. He screams, something guttural and afraid, the animal that beats in his throat rendering him to instinct as he throws the door open and throws himself from the car in a blind, adrenaline fueled panic. He gets caught in the seatbelt, screaming as he claws it from its latch, struggling like it’s a live thing keeping him pinned.

_Shit fuck shit holy shit holy good goddamn—_

His feet hit the pebbled stones of the rest area, and he heaves up the bourbon, the alcohol burning his nose as he blows chunks for a third time today. He spits up the last of it, his mouth tasting like death and taxes, and turns back to the car.

The balloon is innocuous, but he knows it isn’t. It never has been. Slowly, the round red shape turns in his peripheral. White enters his vision and he looks, _forces_ himself to look.

_I love Derry._

The love is implied with the cartoony white heart on the red balloon.

Richie fucking hates this place.

* * *

He gets to the Inn without seeing anyone, thankfully. He doesn’t think he’s in a state to be Trashmouth right now. Right now, he’s Richard Wentworth Tozier, and he is feeling very pink and weak and exposed. He clatters in, collects a key with his name on it, and unloads his duffel on the bed in the room he claims as his. A shower would be nice but he doesn’t like the drains.

He’s never liked the drains.

He smells like LAX and a red-eye and it’s ten in the morning. He’s not due to meet with anyone yet so he stares at the shower curtain. White plastic shouldn’t seem ominous and yet—

He inhales, feels bile rise in the back of his throat.

No. Not again. Not today. Fuck this place.

“Fuck it.”

He showers in record time, searing his skin with boiling water from creaking pipes, listening for the sound of voices. It’s silent, almost mocking, and he hears the water gurgle down the drain but it doesn’t sound like himself or anyone else he knows, so that’s a bonus.

He smells less like sweat and more like the bar soap provided by the Inn. Good enough. _Good enough._

Richie collapses into the lumpy full mattress, burying his head in the pillows. He’s out before he remembers to set the alarm.

* * *

Oh joy, he thinks, as he blinks awake in the heavy gloom of twilight. He’s not dead. Or worse, late.

There’s a joke there, but damned if he can think of the punchline.

He almost wishes he was brave enough to drive the fuck back to Bangor, to take the flight that would take him back to LAX and home, where the sunset didn’t come with monsters—or at least if it did, it was monsters he could deal with. Instead, he rolls out of bed, bare feet hitting the floor almost tentatively, as though something lurked beneath the bed to snatch his ankle.

(Oh, but there is, Richie thinks. Because you’re back in fucking Derry and you know what it’s like. It gets in your head and it _festers_ —)

He throws on his clothes, something that isn’t wrinkled or stained from travel, and he runs a hand through his hair. It’s not great, but it’s on brand. He thinks it’ll be fine.

Fuck it. He’ll deal with it. He’ll probably die, but that’s why he never bought the round trip. Cheaper.

He grimaces in the mirror, trying to find the energy to be himself, but all he feels is cold. It’s old, older than they are, and alien. He knew the chill of this place when Bill had made him swear, so long ago. He can remember the hands in his, small and terrified like his own.

(Who had they belonged to?)

It doesn’t matter.

He is home.

* * *

The streets are wet, the roads familiar. He remembers the way to Jade of the Orient as soon as he sits down in his rental; the directions slide into his head like a glob of viscous jam from the blunt blade of a knife—back into the jar it was scooped from. Derry’s sole ‘fancy’ restaurant, he had been here for birthdays and anniversaries and wakes. He returns now for a reunion, of sorts.

Despite himself, he’s eager to see his friends.

He’s missed them, desperately, in a way that aches all the way to his bones. They had always ever been the ones who saw him, really saw him. It’s jarring, placing faces to names and almost able to remember. He wonders if it will click like the directions if he sees them. There’s only one way to find out.

He pulls up, wondering if he’s the last one there. Fashionably late, ever the slacker. It’s on brand, so he doesn’t stop to correct himself.

But—oh, he knows that halo of red hair. He sees her, arcing through the air into the dark water of the quarry, remembers hastily chasing after her, laughing as she starts a water fight. Scarred hands and cigarettes, bright eyes and a brighter laugh.

He wants to cry. He wants to climb inside her arms and never leave. Oh, he’s _missed_ Beverly. He aches with the knowledge, jaw grit tight as he strides forward, watching her hug someone else.

“It’s Ben,” he hears, straining and yet not. In case this is a boyfriend she’s brought with her. But no, it’s—

Richie can see, and yet not, the changes that Ben Hanscom has gone through. He’s still the shy kid, but now he has muscle and definition where once he was round and soft. He’s gotten tall, and Richie stops for a moment. He can feel the ruffle of Ben’s hair beneath his own palm, though it’s been years since he’s done it. He can smell the earth and the damp wood of—

Where.

He almost has it, like he’s stretching to reach a tall shelf. Fingertips brushing—

No. Not yet. The thought flitters from his mind, discarded. Instead, he’s caught looking them over again. They’ve both changed so much. He’s still the same.

He suddenly feels small. Too small for them and their immense brightness, their shine showing the dullness of his own coin. He swallows, fists clenching and unclenching as they greet one another. He will go blind if he stares.

_Say something._

He can’t. His throat is tight, he can’t breathe, just like—

_Who?_

He swallows again, around the lump in his throat.

_Say something, numbnuts._

That voice is familiar. Acerbic, cutting, amused and sarcastic, but not him. No, he’s infinitely shittier to himself. _This_ voice is fond, exasperated. So familiar it hurts, it pierces his hesitation like a needle, bleeding the ichor from his thoughts and spilling words from his mouth before he can stop himself.

“You two look amazing. What the _fuck_ happened to me?”

* * *

He can smell moo goo gai pan, and his mouth is already fucking watering. It’s been forever since he’s had properly shellacked and prepped Chinese food, not this Asian Fusion stuff every white boy with a knife roll and a dream of being on Iron Chef whips up. No, the stuff the Orient whips up is solid, hearty favorites and in piles that should be criminal for how little they charge. In other words, proper Chinese food. He sniffs, appreciatively, his eyes drawn toward the kitchen where steam billows every time the wait staff pushes through the doors.

He’s gonna eat himself into a coma.

They’re led toward a room in the back, which Richie appreciates. A private room for a private reunion. It’s good. He’s missed the others, too, and he’s not just starving to eat, he’s starving to see them.

There are three of them and three of the others, six in total.

Seven, he thinks. There should be seven. The lucky number. He doesn’t…

Where’s Stan?

That’s his first thought, counting heads. Their backs are turned to him, but he knows them. He Knows them, and they Know him. Stan is missing.

How does he know Stan is missing?

Well, that’s easy, his brain supplies. That’s Bev and Ben with him. Mikey is obvious. That’s Bill, clearly. The memories slot into place like they’ve never left, like he should feel stupid about asking in the first place. And that’s—

Eddie fucking Kaspbrak.

It’s like standing in a tunnel while a train bears down on you, full tilt. All you can see is the headlight and hear the roar of the wheels, feel the bone-rattling shake of the engine on the tracks, but all you can do is just let it run you over. It’s too late to move, to dive out of the way, and a wave of memory slaps into Richie so hard he’s reeling, his knees gone watery and his vision doubling.

Eddie is the hypocenter, this shockwave of emotion, of feeling radiating outward like the first blast, meant to flatten him. He remembers, he _remembers_ , and he might die in the process because Eddie is everywhere, painted in his memory like a mural and his heart feels like it’s started beating for the first time in almost twenty-two years. Sluggish, then not, ramping up and making spots appear before his vision as he takes him in. Memories rush back, filling him full and then overflowing, coating him in feelings he thought he’d killed with skeevy bars and Grindr hookups—because repressed doesn’t mean dead, now does it, Trashmouth?

Summer days in a hammock, shaded and yet not. Reading comic books, the smell of antiseptic ointment. The rubber smell of band-aids and the astringency of rubbing alcohol. Something sweet, like apples or caramel candy, just a whiff but enough to keep him rooted in place, throat working around a sentence he could never say. The green-black of the quarry, closing over his head until he surfaces, catching sight of an evil grin as he’s pushed under again. A foot to the face. An elbow digging into his ribs, hands cupping his face and examining him for cuts and bruises.

Richie is staring at Eddie in profile, the upturned nose gone harsh and lean, his cheekbones high and thin enough to slice glass. His brows are upturned, interested as he talks with Bill and Mike, and Richie remembers how they’d beetle into a frown when he was being a shit on purpose, to get a rise out of him. His mouth is a generous slash in his face, the corners dropping in a neutral frown, but Richie knows that when he smiles it’s huge, like it encompasses the whole world. Big, dark eyes are still as disarming as ever, able to demand the moon from Richie and he’d be halfway to fashioning a lasso before he ever thought to question it.

_He’s different. But not. He still has the little pinch between his brows when he frowns. He pouts when he doesn’t like what he hears._ Richie’s throat feels like it’s being squeezed. _That’s why you bought the first aid kit. Like he wouldn’t have one, anymore, but you had to make sure. That is Eddie Kaspbrak, and you still love him. You never stopped. You just forgot for a while._

He knows he hasn’t made a sound. He’s tucked behind Ben and Bev, he wanted to be last on purpose. Now he knows why. He needed this; he needed time to get his shit together. (This is a lie: Richie Tozier has never had his shit together in his life, not once.)

He wonders if there’s still time to run. Time to flee and go back to LA and crawl into a bottle and never come out.

He knows it’s too late. He’s well and truly fucked.

So, he does what he does best. He picks up the mallet beside the little brass gong next to him and he makes some fucking noise.

“This meeting of the Losers Club has officially begun!” He crows, injecting his voice with false brightness.

Eddie smiles, tentatively. It’s not the same, it’s not the hidden ‘I-shouldn’t-be-laughing-it-will-encourage-him’ smile. It’s an ‘I don’t know you anymore’ smile. But he gestures, and Richie catches sight of his left hand, of the gold band that shines even the dim light of the back room, and he feels the color drain from his face.

Back for less than a day, and he’s already gotten his heart broken. That has to be a record.

“Look at these guys,” Eddie says. Awkward, not sure what to do with himself.

Richie decides he needs a fucking drink. Or ten.

* * *

The token hurts his hand from where he’s gripping it. There’s a coppery tang in his mouth from where he’s bitten his tongue so hard it’s bleeding, but he’s got it. He’s got his token and he’s got a wild idea that he might just make it out of this alive.

The thought strikes him then, as he jogs hard back toward the Inn, not running but definitely not walking—what exactly does he do if he does survive this?

_I know your dirty little secret, Richie._

Well, fuck, in this day and age, who doesn’t? He thinks it, bitterly, to himself. TMZ would pay bank for the scoop, but it wasn’t as if being out wasn’t acceptable now. He doesn’t live here anymore, in homophobe central.

His parents might not understand, but they’ve always been supportive, even if his mother hates his shows. She never tells him not to, never chastises him. His father would respect his choices, like he always did. They’d been consistent since Derry, which leads him, specifically, to believe that it’s this place that’s poison.

Everyone who matters is back at the Inn, or would be soon. He could tell them, first. _Get the drop on that Pennywoke bitch. Yeah._ They might not care. Or they’d just think he was kidding. But it’s important to him, that they know.

He slips the token in his pocket, next to Stan’s shower cap. There’s a pang there, as his fingers brush the thin, aging plastic.

He misses Stanley suddenly, fiercely and unbidden, and he scrubs a hand over his eyes as he crosses the street. He almost wishes a car would hit him, but he knows better. They’ve been brought together for a purpose. It might try to kill him, but not like that. It likes to savor Its meals.

Stan would have known what to say. As much shit as he gave Stanley Uris, he would have still had something measured and thoughtful to say about it. And Richie would have felt like a dumbass for ever worrying about it in the first place.

He could do that. When it’s over.

The thought makes him run faster.

* * *

Beverly never explained the Deadlights to them. Richie knows now that there was no way she could have. They’re terrible, with an otherworldly beauty and he can’t stop looking. He cuts his eyes away, looking obliquely, but he somehow knows it won’t really help.

They shine endlessly in the darkness, around him and through him and he floats toward them, as though down a long tunnel. He has a feeling of being here but not. He realizes that his body is elsewhere, that this is something else entirely.

He can see a turtle in the distance, off to his left; he realizes that it’s dead. He doesn’t know how he knows that. He just knows that it is.

The whole world is orange, bright and searing, and they’re coming closer. He should let them, he thinks, his whole brain sluggish. It would be over then, if they rushed up to meet him. But that’s not how they work. He doesn’t know how he knows that.

Images start to float into his brain.

Stanley, cutting his wrists. He’s sitting in the tub and Richie cries out soundlessly, watching Stan mouth something toward the ceiling. Richie is sitting across from him in the bathroom, but the gulf is too big, too wide. He can’t—

Beverly, being beaten to a pulp by a man he remembers seeing in her press releases as her husband. His fists clench, but it’s like running chest deep in chunky soup, he’s not going anywhere. He can’t reach her. She’s stopped breathing long ago, but Tom doesn’t stop. He won’t.

Bill, alone on a movie set as they shut off the lights. The movie has failed, folded, and as the final light goes out Bill fades from view. Richie can’t see him anymore and he knows that he won’t, his heart in his throat. Bill’s got a bottle of something at home, hair of the dog. He’s got opiates, little pills that Hollywood loves to pawn off to make things all okay. We happy few. Richie knows this evil intimately, without the Deadlights, and he knows Bill won’t survive this bender. Bill’s going to die—

Ben sits on the deck of his remote cabin. He built it in the wilderness so he’d have privacy, modern lines built with natural curves, blending seamlessly into the area. He has everything. He is still unhappy. Ben turns over the snubnosed .38 in his strong hands. Richie screams for him, but he can’t be heard over the reverberation of the shot that scares the birds into startled, frantic flight.

Mike is jumped on his way back to the library. They tried everything and they failed. Derry is just Derry, and Derry hates an anomaly. He’s dragged into an alley, where people who knew him, his parents, hold pipes and bats and stare down at him with cold eyes. He knows this look, Mike thinks, and Richie doesn’t know how he knows but this isn’t like Bowers. Yet it is, the undercurrent of hostility that Mike always felt but Richie never knew, and the lines of fear that sizzle through him must be Mike’s because he’s never felt like this. How could he? He was the ‘right’ color for Derry, while Mike was the outsider, the unusual, the invader. Even being who he is, it’s not the same, has never been the same, because Richie could hide who he was, could push it down and pretend and fake a normalcy that Mike has never known. Richie knows he can’t save him. He can’t even help, trapped across the street and yet in the moment as the first blow falls. Mike gives in, lets them have it. He failed. He’ll take his punishment.

Eddie goes home to his wife.

Richie tries to shut his eyes but he knows he can’t. He knows. He’ll see this regardless. He’s heartsick, the images coming unbidden, faster and faster and faster, whipping through his mind like a maniac’s at the controls, fast forwarding the movie beyond his reckoning but he still knows what happens. He’s been directed to his life’s IMDb page and he’s looking for spoilers now.

Eddie kisses her chastely on the cheek, and Richie wants to throw up. He doesn’t have a body to use for that anymore, so he’s forced to watch as Eddie climbs the stairs to a secondary bedroom, one that’s his own, not his wife’s. Separate bedrooms, because that’s healthiest for a marriage. Myra read that in a journal somewhere, and Eddie is used to giving her what she needs to keep them both healthy. He sits down on the bed, and he pulls out a new prescription, shaking out the recommended dosage into his palm.

The scar is gone, Richie thinks, watching as Eddie swallows the dose.

Then two more.

Then again.

Again.

Richie watches Eddie swallow the whole bottle, calmly and with a steely-eyed patience that was Eddie’s trademark when he wanted something. Richie’s pounding on the glass of his own enclosure, screaming with a soundlessness that makes him hoarse, punching at invisible walls and bonds that hold him in place.

_It’s just like going to sleep_. Eddie’s thoughts are fuzzy, and Richie whips around to look at him, as though he could have turned from the sight to look away in the first place. No, his focus turns, he realizes, his consciousness caged and yet not, held in place by the awful orange that coats everything in marigold. _It doesn’t hurt at all._

Richie’s glad for that, because this is _killing him_ , Eduardo.

“You can stop it, you know,” says a voice, and Richie damn near jumps out of his skin. He looks around, vision pitching and yawing, not used to having to sort out a z-axis as well. He notices the turtle, then, the corpse floating in space. It’s much closer than it was. Had it closed the distance, or had he? He doesn’t know.

“Who—”

“Doesn’t matter, kid.” The voice is tremulous, as though coming from a long way away. “But if you stay here, all of that’s gonna come true. I can’t keep—”

Here the voice fades out, as though the name has been censored, to protect the innocent.

“—at bay anymore,” the turtle says. Its eyes are glassy, sightless. There’s a bite taken from the shell, jagged and crushed, like something with massive jaws had come at the turtle like a piece of candy and then dropped it to let the fillings spill out. Richie can see the gleaming wet bone and the dead-dry flakes of its shell, the rotting meat of its back, smell the fishy sour-sweet scent of decay.

“How—”

“You gotta get back there. You’ve got people who love you, kid. Use it. The oath you swore, it’s good, it’ll get you through, hell, it might even protect you a bit, but even that stored up magic can only do so much if you waste it. Look after each other.”

He doesn’t understand, but he thinks he does. He almost does, like his fingers are brushing at something in the dark. If he can just get his hand around it, he can—

_Richie!_

He can hear his name, coming from a long way away, sees the turtle start to drift away.

_Richie, please! Come on, man, come **on** —_

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me, kid. You still gotta kill It.”

He feels a tug behind his belly button, a yank so strong it sends him hurtling back out of the Deadlights, back to Earth. Like someone tied a rope to his insides and now they’re reeling him in.

Ground control to Major Tom, he thinks as his thoughts fragment like stained glass, and then he’s blinking up at Eddie, dazed and confused. He remembers how they pulled Bev from the Deadlights before, and he hopes but doesn’t, he doesn’t know what he wants and yet—

“Hey, there he is, there he is,” Eddie croons down at Richie and he is _not_ dead, he realizes. Eddie’s palm is chill, but it always has been, as it pats at his face. “Come on, we gotta move. I hurt It, really bad. I think—I think I killed It—”

You didn’t, Richie thinks, and it is what saves them, because he wraps too-big hands in Eddie’s sweatshirt and yanks him down. A split second later and the claw that pierces Eddie’s shoulder would have gone through his chest, and Richie screams with Eddie as It yanks the pincer back, laughing.

The sound is something he will never forget, the sucking **wet** sound of meat and the scrape of bone, Eddie in his arms and writhing in pain, hot blood gushing over his hands. He crams his hand against the wound, trying to remember every half-assed first aid lesson Eddie ever taught him, scolding him every time he did shit like this.

“Stay with me, Eds, I got you, I _got_ you.” Richie hauls Eddie to safety, shucking his coat and pressing it against the gleaming wetness of the wound. Eddie is incoherent but he’s breathing, Richie tries to see through his own tears but Eddie finally gets it together and presses himself back against the stone, bracing his legs so that he can press hard against the entrance wound, his smaller palm pressed against the jacket on the exit wound.

_He’ll survive_. _But you gotta work for it._

Richie doesn’t know how he knows. He just knows the words are coated in marigold.

* * *

Richie has never been strong. Or at least, he’s never considered himself strong. Neibolt has always scared the bejeezus out of him, but now he’s not thinking of that. He knows he can carry Eddie out of here. He’s got to.

“We can’t take him with us,” Bev says. “Honey, he’s—"

“We have to,” Richie says, getting his hands under Eddie’s back and his thighs. “He’s still breathing.”

He weighs so little, right now, like he’s been drained of everything he’s got in him and the thought starts a klaxon of panic in Richie’s head, situated over the lizard hind-brain and overriding fear for himself with fear for Eddie. He’s much smaller than Richie, the size difference noticeable now that Richie’s got him in his arms. How much blood does the average human have in them? The one who knows the answer off the cuff is currently unconscious in his arms and he hurries toward the entrance of Its lair, feeling the whole cavern rock beneath the soles of his feet.

Even if he never had him in the first place, Richie can’t lose him again. He can see the shallow rise and fall of Eddie’s breathing, the garish hole in his shoulder. The blood on his mouth. Bev catches sight of it too, and she takes the flashlight to light the way, pushing ahead of him into the darkness.

He feels a hand on his shoulder.

“I’ve _got_ him,” Richie says, whipping his head back and _snarling_ at Ben, who’s reaching for him and Richie will not hesitate to _bite_ if they try to take Eddie from him, to leave him down here in the dark.

Eddie would _hate_ it.

The thought makes him savage, feral, and he shrugs off Ben’s hand. He realizes Ben was offering his help, and he’ll apologize. Later. _Later._ Richie starts his long slog back to the surface, even as Bill and Ben and Mike push forward to help him maneuver on the slick stones that lead into the sewer’s drainpipe.

Losers don’t leave one of their own behind.

Eddie is all that he is, all that he was and will be, all that matters. He can’t do this without him, and he fucking won’t. Richie is taking Eddie with him or he’ll die trying, and the Losers can’t do anything but follow—and they wouldn’t do anything less, he realizes, now.

Bev helps him over a stumbling block, cracked concrete that pushes up like jagged jaws. The whole sewer is shaking, an ominous rumbling that sets his teeth on edge. The others help him navigate, calling out pitfalls and sinks, walking crumbling paths.

He fights his way to the surface as Neibolt crumbles beneath his feet. The whole thing is coming down around his ears. He knows. He _knows_. He’s cost them time they don’t have with Its death, but it doesn’t feel right, leaving him there. Eddie is still breathing. He’s alive and Richie’s gonna keep him that way, hoisting him over a big shoulder as they slog through the filthy water, trying to keep his wounds out of the muck.

They make it to the rope and the way is still clear. There’s still hope. They can do this, Richie thinks wildly, and he knows he’s right, with the same certainty he had in the Deadlights, that he knows how this turns out. Ben’s jacket and Richie’s shirt make a makeshift sling, and it’s gonna hurt, but it’ll get him up and out of the well.

Thank god he’s unconscious, Richie thinks.

Bill shimmies up the rope to take the burden of Eddie’s weight at the top, and Richie’s shoulders scream as he hauls on the rope as fast as it will go. His hands burn with the effort but he doesn’t give a fuck, they just gotta get it done.

For once in his life, he feels like he’s doing the right thing.

Once Eddie is up, they haul up Bev. Ben and Mike shimmy up and Richie hauls himself up, hand over hand over hand. He has to stop, halfway, his head hanging down. He’s exhausted, nothing more in him. He used it all up to carry Eddie this far. His arms feel like stone pillars and he can’t lift them or himself anymore.

He’s never been in shape and adrenaline is shorting out, his muscles seizing the longer he stays still.

“R-R-Richie!” Bill shouts to him, the gleam of Eddie’s headlamp on his head making his silhouette eerie and jarring in the cascading dark. Light skitters off wet stone, blinding Richie. “Come on!”

“Just a second, Bill,” Richie calls. “Tired.”

He just needs a second.

The rope starts moving. Richie hangs on, head swaying with the movement. Mike’s hands grip him under his armpits and he’s dragged from the wellhouse.

“You did good, Rich,” Mike mumbles. “You did good. Come on. I got you.”

“Ed—”

“Ben has him.” Mike and Bill help him stand, and he leans on them as they limp from Neibolt, navigating tunneling hallways and dead ends and pitfalls as the house shakes apart. They follow marks Bev has scored in the walls, guiding them up and into the light of the rising sun.

The house has lost most of its sinister cast; it is now just a house, without Pennywise to make it breathe. Old and rotten, floors buckling and walls shuddering with the snap of age-softened boards, but it is not the same, the terror that dwells here now is the perfectly reasonable one that you will fall in a hole and twist your ankle.

They tumble to the dead grass from the porch just in time, and Ben and Bev move to help drag them further away as the old house, perhaps because its true owner is now pulp in the warrens beneath it, collapses. A sink hole opens up beneath their feet, and they scramble away. Richie nearly loses his footing to the thing, but Mike and Ben haul him back before he can slide down and into it.

Old wood and blackened brick fall, almost silent compared to the rumble of the earth itself. Richie turns from the scene, though, managing to wriggle toward where Eddie’s laid out in the grass. He can’t even stand, crawling to where his best friend lays on the abandoned street.

Queen, of all things, floats through his head as he stares down at Eddie. _You’ve broken my heart, and now you leave me—_

He’s beatific, but pale; his eyes are closed, brow smooth, and Richie is terrified he’s lost him until he sees the shallow rise and fall of Eddie’s chest. Richie rolls to the side and is sick in the ditch, one final time, as sirens howl with the rising of the dawn.

* * *

Richie is the first to leave Derry, once Eddie awakens. He hugs them all hard, tells them he’s gotta get his shit together. (This is another lie: Everyone knows that Richie Tozier has never once gotten his shit together, not once.)

Eddie is still pretty out of it, but that’s a good thing as Richie tells him he’ll see him later. It means that Eddie believes him, smiling at him in a goofy, crooked way that makes Richie’s too-big heart lurch against his ribs like he’s playing a doumbek. He can see the light in Eddie’s eyes and knows that it’s not for him. He doesn’t get that sort of happy ending.

No.

What he gets is a stop by the Kissing Bridge where he squats and reminds himself that he’s braver than he thinks, too. He freshens the carving, not willing to let it fade. A final ‘fuck you’ to Derry as he puts it in his rearview and leaves for good.

He’s Richie fucking Tozier, and the Trashmouth has left the building.

* * *

Bev yells at him for a solid week about it, but he did the right thing, he knows. He relaunches his career, his manager forgiving his bender as a ‘midlife crisis’ because who the hell would believe that he spent two weeks to go home, troop down into a sewer in a small Maine town and kill an eldritch being that terrorized him and his friends during his childhood in the shape of a fucking clown?

No one, that’s who.

No, he tells his manager he was in Vegas, doing blow and drinking himself stupid because he just turned forty and he’s working too hard, man.

His manager forgives him. It’s easy. He’s the moneymaker, after all. Don’t fuck with the bread and butter.

His standup goes live, and he heads back out onto the tour circuit, promoting himself with talk shows and press releases. He’s living back in his old skin, doing his old job, and he should be happy. Six weeks later, he finds out from Bill that Stan is alive in Georgia, though not well. No fucking shit, he thinks, as he takes what little free time he has and catches a plane.

Stan is doing better. Not great, but better. These kids, they’ll be all right. Eventually. He and his best friends came out of that alive, he should be content with that.

He isn’t.

His old life, his old habits, they don’t fit anymore, like a jacket that’s too small in the shoulders and if he bends wrong, shifts too much, it’ll burst at the seams. He’s faced death and lived through the Deadlights, an audience of people doesn’t scare the shit out of him. He tries to keep it together.

(That’s the third lie: Richie Tozier has never been able to keep it together in his life, not once.)

He makes it six months, living out the old pathways of his life, stumbling through the ruts they’ve left behind on his new, unfamiliar feet. He tries to keep things on track, to go back to the way things were before.

This—of course, of fucking _course_ —means that he blurts it out on a live taping of Conan O’Brien, of all places the worst possible place for this, because it cannot be unsaid. He cannot walk it back. He cannot undo it in editing and throw it out like he hadn’t really meant it.

“Yeah, I don’t get women, man,” he’s saying, feeling the words like old friends, because it’s an anecdote he’s told a million, million times. That frat-boy approved rhetoric and he thinks, no, I do. I understand Bev. She probably hates this shit too, if she even watches. Shit.

“But Richie—” Conan is laughing, he’s the penultimate host, always. He’s told Richie in private that he loves his work, in that side-eyed, secretive way that one approves of someone like the Trashmouth. _I like you, but I don’t want my friends and family to know._

The whole thing makes him tired.

“No, no, I do understand women, mostly,” he says, instead. Conan can somehow sense the shift in the wind, when someone is going off script, but the light in his eyes means something to Richie, encourages him. This man has written comedy almost as long as Richie has been performing, he’s a little older but he gets it, he’s come up in the same way Richie has, through blood and sweat and tears, bombing on stage and fighting for it.

There’s a tacit approval there, and he just blurts it out.

“I mean, as much as any gay man can understand women—”

The crowd gasps and there’s almost a riot as cell phones are whipped out, as though DVRs around the world aren’t recording this for uploading later. It’ll be on the internet in seconds, he doesn’t have a choice now, because he’s made it.

He’d meant to tell the Losers first, but it never seemed right, timing wise. He’s slid back into Trashmouth, always being on and bickering with them amiably in the group chat, but never letting them in. He feels too raw, too vulnerable to do it and so it had vented itself another way. He can feel his phone buzzing in his pocket, lighting against his thigh like he’s on fire, and he knows he’s fucked but he’s free now. He doesn’t care.

It’s not a secret anymore, and he doesn’t want it to be. It’s out there. It feels good to say.

If that means he loses the life he’s built here, that’s fine. Hollywood’s left a bad taste in his mouth for a while.

* * *

What it means is that he ends up having to fire his manager.

Richie is, by far, Marvin Stuart’s biggest client, and one that his firm made him handle personally. He had already told Richie he was on thin ice for bombing out at The Improv. It was not only hard to book there, even for a name like Richie’s, it was harder to keep one’s reputation after doing so and then flaking.

Richie’s a flake, he knows he’s a flake in the eyes of the world, but it was a promise and he kept it and he can’t find it in himself to be guilty for it. Not now, not ever. He’ll mime his apology and fake it until he’s made it, but he doesn’t have a shred of guilt for watching Eddie’s eyes blink open in the hospital room, or Bill’s relieved sigh when the thing was dead for good. Mike’s shudder as he finally dropped the burden he’d been carrying for nearly thirty years, that’s worth a hundred thousand of Richie’s apologies.

He doesn’t think a hundred thousand apologies are enough to pay for the sight of Stan, sitting in his own separate hospital bed, staring at them like he’s afraid they hated him. (They couldn’t, they never could. They’ve loved him too much, too deeply, for too long.)

Marv has been with him through a lot. He discovered Richie in a shitty bar with a shitty open mic night and he believed that Richie could make something of himself. And Richie did, he’s funny and can work a crowd like no one’s business. He hasn’t written his own material for years, and that is due in part to Marv taking one look at Richie’s creative work ethic and deciding that a group of writers in a room writing for months and carefully crafting jokes was better than what Richie was serving on stage.

“Just for now,” he’d told Richie. “Once you make it big, you can write your own stuff, and it’ll kill. This’ll give you padding to work on it.”

Richie believed him, in the way that he’d once believed that silver could kill a clown.

He’d accepted the idea that he needed Marv’s help for so long that Marv became a pseudo sort of parent, and that was a dangerous sort of thing when one controlled another person’s livelihood. As the years went by, Richie started leaning on the writers more and more, the stubborn part of him that wanted to tweak a joke or his timing slowing down, much like his metabolism once he hit twenty-eight. Eventually, they were writing and choreographing the whole thing.

Nothing had stung like Eddie’s victorious “I fucking knew it!” as they’d retreated from the Jade of the Orient. Richie could still feel the sodden shame well up in him at the thought.

But now? His give a damn is broken and he’s feeling mutinous when the first thing he wakes up to after Conan O’Brien’s live taping is eight messages and seventeen texts from Marv, demanding he call him back. Richie had gone home and circled the wagons, assuring the Losers he was all right, just working on some shit.

They get it. They’d let him do his thing, reminding him that they’re there. All of them had been vocal in their support. He loves them. They love him. That was one fact that had never lied to him. It has remained as true as north, even when he couldn’t remember. Richie sighs out, content with that, if nothing else.

He dials his manager before dinner. He settles into his couch, legs splayed out in front of him. It’s time to take care of business.

“Marv,” he says when the line connects.

“About fucking time, Richie, what the hell, man?” Marv’s voice is high and tight, reminding Eddie of disappointing a teacher. “You ghost me for a day and a half after bombing O’Brien? You know you’re one of his faves when things are slow—”

“Marv.” Richie begs himself for patience. “I got shit to sort through. But I saw your texts and voicemails.”

“And?” Marv asks. “Do you know how hard PR has been working to walk this back? You blurted out that you were a homo, live on fucking TV. There’s not tape to edit!”

“I gotta say, I can’t quite find it in me to give a shit,” Richie says.

“Rich, you don’t mean that, your career—”

“—will either recover, or it won’t,” Richie says. He somehow manages to keep his calm, and he thinks that’s what rattles Marv the most. “Man, my career has been me reading cobbled together garbage for decades, you think people aren’t eating this shit up? This is an opportunity to burn the fucker to the ground and pave over the ashes.”

“Rich—”

“Nah, man. You’re thinking of your bottom line, and I get it. I respect it, even though I’m the one getting fucked over.”

“That’s not—”

“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, Marv. I’ve known you way longer than anyone else, and you’ve always done this. Protecting your investments. You want me to walk back the first time I’ve ever said that to anyone, ever, out loud. Marv, do you even remember who you’re fucking talking to?” Richie’s laugh is less manic and more joyous, like he feels a weight of his own slide away, falling off his shoulders and hitting the dirt with a metaphorical clank. “I’m Richie Tozier. I’m the fucking _Trashmouth_. If anyone can come outta this smelling like a rose, it’s me. Critics have been panning me for years with that bullshit we’ve been cooking them. The audience knows it. And they’re right. This shit is stale.”

“What are you saying, Rich?” Marv’s voice was deathly quiet, a warning in there that Richie might have been afraid of twenty years ago. Hell, maybe even five years ago. Instead, all he feels is sure.

“I’m saying that I think we should break up, Marv,” Richie says, a grin touching the corners of his mouth. He kicks up his feet onto the couch. “I really do like dinner and a movie before you bend me over and rail me, and you’ve been fucking me dry for years. I deserve some romance.”

There’s a beat of silence on the other end.

“You’re really leaning into this,” Marv says after a moment.

“Well, you know, at least it’s on brand.” Richie’s smile goes just a little wider.

“Are you sure?” Marv asks.

“I’m feeling lucky,” Richie says. He’s bested an eldritch monster from his childhood, recovered all his memories, and now is a free agent with no prospects and a career in shambles behind him.

Richie decides that he’s good with it. Rebuilding is easy. It’s just like recovering from Derry—and belatedly, he realizes that might be exactly it. Derry’s atrophy carrying with him like a sickness, like a cancer buried deep inside. Now that it’s gone…

He’s started from the bottom once before. It’ll just take some work, and that’s something he finds he’s looking forward to doing.

It means he’s alive, after all.

* * *

Richie finds out that Eddie’s moved to LA three weeks after he gets there. He gives Bill the worst noogie he’s had in at least a decade, but Bill had let it slip when Richie had been at the first table read for Bill’s new movie. It had hit like a slap in the face that everyone had known but him.

But maybe that was the point. The last time he’s seen Eddie one on one was in fucking Derry of all places, and he was fucked up on painkillers. Richie can’t really prepare himself for crashing Eddie’s party while Eddie’s sober, but hey, he’s got a new lease on life.

And he’s missed the hell out of the little shit.

So he dithers on the doormat on Sunday, trying to work up the nerve to ring the doorbell. What does he say? Is Eddie going to be angry at him for jetting off? Maybe…

Maybe he should just fortify and get it over with. He can take his licks here, he thinks. He owes it to himself. He owes it to Eddie. He knows that the other should at least get an explanation.

He presses the buzzer. There’s no sound of footsteps, because Eddie’s a silent fucker, able to sneak up on Richie at the best of times in their youth, and also—

“Hey—”

When the door opens, Eddie’s wearing socks. Of course. But Richie can’t look at that, instead he flings himself forward, long arms going around Eddie, too-big hands fisting in the back of his shirt, his cheek pressed to Eddie’s hair.

God, he still loves him. After all of this. It hasn’t burnt out, or faded away. He’s still himself, he still feels dumb and tongue-tied and so goddamn **_much_** around Eddie Kaspbrak.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, smelling Eddie’s shampoo, his cologne.

“Don’t be, Rich,” Eddie says. Richie realizes that Eddie’s clinging to him just as tightly. He can feel Eddie’s hitching breath, feel the squeeze of hands at his back.

For once, Richie allows himself to hope that maybe Eddie’s missed him too.

* * *

"Yeah, so I came out recently," he says into the mic. There are whoops and cheers, some boos. He kind of expects them, grins in their direction in challenge. "What. You can't admit that you laughed at a guy who happens to like a dick in his mouth from time to time?"

The titters from the audience seem to silence the hecklers, as does the gleaming stare from his own blue-grey eyes, brows heavy behind his glasses. He’s winding down his set, knowing that they were waiting on this from him. It’s almost done, and he’s missed this. The smell of it, the hot bright scent of the lights, the faces turned toward him for however long he needs.

It’s been six months, and he’s been fine-tuning this.

He’s in Nashville, of all places, and he’s expecting to bomb, but Zanies is a class act. He knows that he can talk about what he likes; that’s the thrill of this for him. Nothing is taboo.

It’s all about building that rapport.

“But yeah, I came out,” he says, and every time he says it there’s a little less adrenaline, it gets a little more normal, and he could cry with the knowledge. It is not dirty, it is not little, and it is not a secret. It is none of those things.

It’s just him.

“You know, I went back to my hometown, and that’s where I had this revelation,” he says, leaning on the mic stand, the mic in his other hand. Casual, cool, he’s chatting with the Losers. They know. They grew up with him. He’s telling them this story. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been to rural Maine, but it’s hard being a little gay kid out there. There’s nothing but fucking homophobes and lobster. Like, I went stag to prom.”

He waits a beat, for the giggles to die down.

“It was fine, though. At least I didn’t have some girl’s dad with a shotgun standing behind me for prom photos,” he says. “Like, it always seems to be the same thing. ‘Don’t touch my daughter.’ Sir, I promise you, I do not want to. Put down the shotgun, I get it, you called dibs.”

A ripple of laughter echoes through the audience.

There’s no lisp, no stereotypes. It’s just Richie talking now, the audience rapt. “I talked a lot of shit in high school. Girls thought I was disgusting. Hell, _I_ thought I was disgusting.”

He gestures at himself, at the well-cut sport coat and pressed slacks paired with a turtleneck.

“I was not always the handsome slab of meat you see before you,” he says. “Contrary to popular belief, I exist within a subset of the gay community known as a ‘disaster’. The only reason I look this good is because my good friend Beverly Marsh took pity on me and insisted that she dress me. Do you hear me? I cannot even dress myself for these things.”

More laughter, as he grins out, a feral man, soaking in the good vibes. This is where he _belongs_.

“Let me tell you the story of how I ruined a five-year relationship.” Titters run through the crowd. “Don’t worry, it’s not my own. It was, in fact, Bev’s.”

There’s gasps and laughter, but he can see some of them leaning forward in their seats. They love gossip. Even if it’s barely true.

“For the life of me, I cannot understand it. God. We were discussing my love life, right, because who doesn’t love watching a slo-mo train wreck?” He takes a sip of his water to the sound of laughter, gives them time to recover. "And she says to me, 'Richie, when are you going to settle down'? as though I'm some sort of pretty girl who just had her sweet sixteen in a John Hughes film. And I looked right at her and I went 'I'm not. I'm forty and I missed out on a chance to be slutty in my twenties. Now Grindr gets me and my beer gut and my sparkling personality.”

Cheers, raucous now, wolf whistling amid them.

“But you ladies, you love a fucking disaster, don’t you? I'm gay and I still don't understand how we all thirst for dick and it makes us stupid. It does! It makes us fucking idiots. Me, being a man, I'm naturally dumber, but ladies. Just because he showers sometimes does not mean he is a life partner. You deserve to be fucking _wooed_." There’s a lot of female voices shouting approval from the audience now. “You cannot fix a man, girls. Trust me. I am one. We do not work that way. We will change if we love someone, but forcing it, god. But I make you a solemn promise. I will do you the same favor I did for Bev.”

He takes another swig of his water.

“So, I dunno if you know, but I’ve known Bev since we were thirteen. And I love her. She is a goddess who could crush the life from me with her bare hands and I would thank her for it.” He pauses, smiling. “Sorry, I’m getting used to having actual friends again. It’s been a while since we reconnected. I’ll tell you about them all, sometime.”

He glances around, the cameras sliding in along their dollies to catch him from all angles.

“But Bev was in a bad way. We all were, really. So, we all sort of came together again. And we wooed Bev. I’m not going to say I won that one, because I didn’t, the honor goes to Mr. Ben Handsome—I mean, Hanscom.”

There’s definitely a knowing titter from the women of the audience there.

“And frankly, Bev deserves that kind of self-love.” Giggles from the audience pop like soap bubbles against his consciousness. “But we did. We wooed Bev. We showed her how much we love her. We needed her, and she needed us. We brought her back from the brink, just like she did for us. We got her outta there, and God—I remember the first time I saw her really smile again.”

He gives this sigh, one that’s not for the audience but they eat it up, hanging onto his every word. It’s wistful and full of love and longing. He shakes it off after a minute, as though he hadn’t meant to get lost in it. Instead, he paces back and forth across the stage and starts to talk again.

"So, let this be a lesson to you, guys. If you don't treat your wife with the love and respect she deserves, I will come and take her out to lunch, give her the 'girl, dump his ass' speech, and I will steal your wife. I can do it, too, even being queer as a three-dollar bill. Every single one. I don't care, I do _not_ care. You know I will. Trashmouth loves the MILFs, and I say MILF rights. So, love your spouses, because they're the only ones who'll put up with you."

He points around the audience.

"That is how I ended a five-year relationship, one that wasn't mine. And I'd do it again in a heartbeat because I love Bev. Love yourselves. Dump his ass."

It is then that he sees them. All eight of them, sitting in the front row, as the lights drop. He had been pretending to talk to them, to ease his jitters about premiering his new material, to smooth the way. But they are here, in a show of solidarity that has his knees buckling for a minute.

Bill and Audra are sitting together, hands clasped, cheering for him. Mike next to them, his fingers in his mouth as he whistles. Stan and Patty, Patty’s face buried in Stan’s shoulder as she laughs. Ben and Beverly, both of them clapping hard.

And there, front and center, sits Eddie. He’s got tears running down his face, slumped in his seat, one hand strewn over his stomach as he loses his composure. His smile is wide, happy, and unrestrained, dark eyes screwed shut.

It is such a small thing.

It is _everything_.

Richie breathes in, basking in it. Cheering erupts, and he presses a kiss to his fingertips, gesturing out to the audience. It is for the Losers. His friends, his family. His heart and soul, dispersed between them.

“That’s all for me, tonight. Thank you for welcoming me back, Nashville!”

The lights fade down, and he puts the mic back before he trots off the stage to mop the sweat from his brow. As he does, though, he peers out into the audience once more. They’re all talking in the front row, waiting for the crush of people to die down before they cram their way backstage.

He just looks, his gaze hungry to take in the sight of them, because he’s missed them. They come together often, for holidays and celebrations, but every time they part, he has that little feeling of emptiness. It grows less and less, but he will always love it when they all show up at once.

His gaze lands on Eddie, and he startles. Big dark eyes are fixated on him, and there’s a small smirk that lets him know he’s been spotted. The sly kind, like he and Eddie are sharing a secret.

His phone buzzes, and it’s a text.

_[Killed it dead, Rich.]_

Tacit approval from Eddie, and it warms him from the inside out, making him feel like he’s been drizzled in warm honey. He grins, feeling the tears prick at the corners of his eyes.

Finally, things are where they should be. He takes his phone and snaps a photo of all of them, all candid save for Eddie, who smirks for him still, making him run hot and cold and everything in between, his skin humming with a buzz that wasn’t just the show’s adrenaline.

These people, they’re his. He’s theirs. He loves them, and they love him too. It’s exactly what he was looking for, fought for, bled for—it’s where they’re meant to be. It’s his. It’s theirs. All of theirs.

And these kids, he thinks, well—they’re all right.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so it goes. I am pleased to have finished this project so quickly, despite things going on IRL.
> 
> Thank you for sticking with me to the end, Constant Readers. I wanted to focus most on Mike and Stan, and I feel like I did that, because I knew that the movies close the circle on Bill and Bev and Ben and the Richie and Eddie chapters would write themselves. And boy, did they. Thank you for reading, and for your kind comments. I have a couple more fics in this vein, and I'm planning on starting a larger project soon. Keep watching this space, or feel free to prompt me over at [tumblr.](https://lywinis.tumblr.com/)


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